The 2026 installment of Hackaday Europe was last weekend, and I’m still basking in the warm glow of hanging out with such an inspiring group of hackers. It’s hard to emphasize how important it is, maybe especially for those of us on the inside of Hackaday, to get to nerd out together like that. While we do our best to present your stories on our pages, there is just no substitute for getting to talk about projects, hacks, and dreams in real life.
While we can’t bring you all of the side-conversations that took place, we did manage to get the talks recorded, and we’ll be writing them up shortly. We have some bad news on that front, though: due to a technical limitation with the setup that the university had in place, we only got the audio and slide feeds, and not the camera that should have been filming the presenters. Still, we have a record of most everything that went down on the main stage, so stay tuned.
We know that not everyone can make it out to either Supercon or Hackaday Europe, but we heartily recommend keeping your eyes out for local hacker events near you. This weekend, there’s Open Hardware Summit in Berlin, for instance. If you’re near NYC, there’s HOPE coming up in August. If your tastes run more toward retrocomupting, there might be a Vintage Computer Festival chapter near you. Heck, consider looking into some of the more mainstream events as well, if that’s what is in your neighborhood.
It’s definitely more of an effort to get out to an event in the physical world, but the connections you make with fellow hackers are absolutely worth it. Any events that we should know about?
There’s fri3d camp in Belgium in August. A child friendly three day hacker camp.
https://fri3d.be/
This weekend is schalt-kreis.de in Regensburg Germany organized by blinkyparts, will try to make it there next year!
Fascinating. Most of the people that I routinely associate with, there is no such desire to socialize in groups of any size. Perhaps I am just old and cranky. Few of my fellow engineers will willingly make an appearance among large groups. Or perhaps Mr Williams represents an unique subset of the tech-geek culuture. I dunno which among us is the outlier, I’m just an engineer; not a shrink.
That’s because Hackaday folks are not the common folks!
And I don’t believe there’s an age limit! (of course, maybe Elliot can confirm that)
Wherever you are Brian, you might need to find an event like one of the Hackaday events. Show up with a cool project in hand or at least ideas about one :)
Good job this isn’t a technical website or boy would this be embarrassing.