AI currently creates a very real fear that the future is not safe anymore. Every week brings another headline: faster, stronger, more adopted, more unavoidable. Some people already scream that tech jobs will be gone in months or a few years. And honestly, I do look at that development with concern, especially while statistics keep parroting new CVEs every single day.
That is also why events like Easterhegg give me hope. And ideas.
Compared to Congress, Easterhegg (3.-6.05.2026) is the smaller in-between character: more compact, more direct, a bit more chaotic in a good way. This year it took place at the University of Koblenz, with around 750 participants, two buildings, two lecture rooms, workshops, and SOS sessions for going deeper or getting your hands dirty on a topic.
For me, it was a surprisingly packed weekend: I got to hold four small talks.
On Friday evening, I gave an introduction to RoboCup and how to join, either with your own robot or as a volunteer. Saturday morning started with my self-hosting story: from one humble Raspberry Pi at home to a more serious setup with multiple VPS and home servers, all in the name of freeing myself a little more from BigTech-chains. Later, I also showed how to get into embedded programming with an STM32 and Rust, for people interested in RoboCup or simply tired of clouds everywhere. My final talk on Sunday morning covered deceptive patterns on the internet: how widespread they are, how to spot them better, and how we can push back against them a bit more effectively.
Big thanks at this point to my great heralds for pushing me to finish in time and for the lovely introductions, to the A/V angels making recordings and on-stage tech possible, and to the #eh23 content team. I genuinely hope you get some sleep again.
Of course, my talks were only a tiny part of the whole event. There were many more, and yes, AI was a topic too: in discussions, in talks, in concerns, in side comments over food and cables. From hardware scarcity to questionable accuracy to the increasingly hostile takeover of everyday life, it is very much present. But also: the current AI boom still looks a lot like a giant bubble powered by investor panic and rich-kid MBA gambling. If it really worked as well as advertised, it would not need to be shoved into every product with that much force. I will write more about that separately.
Outside the talks, I also soldered my new Easterhegg badge with help from DukeDrake: a little cake with glowing bunny ears, perfectly fitting the theme, “the bunny is a lie”. What exactly the theme means? We do not know. What the squares in the logo mean? Also unclear. But it feels very on brand for a hacker event to collectively accept that nobody fully knows what is going on, and still make cool things anyway. The SMD soldering challenge is next. My hands are not ready, but that has never stopped anyone before.
I also did some volunteer shifts again: baking waffles, keeping the Tschunk supplies stocked, and generally helping to keep things running. As always, a lot of fun, especially with the right music and a crowd willing to jump through basically every genre with me. I was also equipped with a pair of themed bunny socks by the Orga, which felt like proper operational gear for bar and waffle duty. The sugar-coated croissant waffles were sadly not for me, thanks to the hidden egg surprise, but they made a lot of other people happy. Same for the vegan heart-shaped waffles and the classic Belgian ones. And yes, some people may also have heard rumors of “special” late-night waffles with extra caffeine support for the crew. I can neither confirm nor deny good engineering practice under sleep deprivation.
It was fun again. And now I am already looking forward to the next Easter hack event in Vienna next year.