STEP Auto - Another STEP in my career to cherish

It was my third experience presenting a paper in an International Conference and the Second STEP Auto. I should say, this time they made a tremendous job and improved a lot when compared the one happened early this year. I happen to witness a keynote address and few best practice papers. The keynote address was fine and best practices papers are equally good. But some of the papers delve deep into test management which are not so relevant to me at this point of time, so I choose to skip those sessions.

Our talk was scheduled as last slot in the best practices but does that mean the audiences were in the mood to leave for the day. Not absolutely. The audiences were wonderful with sparkle in the eyes, eager and welcoming thoughts from all the speakers. We were just preparing to make our speech in a different way and at the same time we wanted to put our thoughts on Web Application Security. It was our undoubted thought that anything is a character and done with a Passion becomes an Art. Especially, the web application security as there is no silver bullets and attacking them is pretty easy. Our thoughts are mainly focused on the words Art, Passion and Character and the rest of the technical details revolved around these foundations.

We had a sweet surprise to us even before our talk. The shock was that the last two talks had to be done in 20 minutes instead of allocated 35 minutes. The person who presented before us literally found hard to put his thought and he was asking for more time (literally). It is not fair in the part of the conference people to get the time from the speakers. So we had some time (20 minutes) to think and we did not speak with each other. But we had clear plan which was not trying to cover entire slides but covering few slides in depth.

We stepped in and as expected, we were requested (asked) to complete the talk in 20 minutes. We assured that we would stick with time (we tried to be gentlemen.. but really aren’t). My friend started off the presentation and he progressed through slides. I didn’t see the watch but he would have taken 12-15 minutes. He talked about web application evolution, threat classification, “panic and patch” and patch management process. I took over and talked on Security in SDLC followed by penetration testing. Finally, we wrapped up the talk with a “Take away” and “What it takes to follow”.

I wasn’t aware about the response from the audiences. Here and there we had an unusual (usual) pun. We spoke for 35 minutes and we got a nice comment from the conference chairman that people would like our talk even if we speak for 45 minutes. What a comment? I was craving and aiming for comments like those and made public speaking, a passion. We do receive similar response from one of the participants. Overall, it was great feeling. Technically, I have a long way to go and this is just a starting.

I aspire to write similar blogs in future quite consistently.