WHY 2025 was part of the International Festivals for Creative Applications of Technology (IFCAT) foundation’s quadrennial volunteer-led hacker camps, outdoors variants of the same tradition as the conventions by the German Chaos Computer Club.
While the event was hosted in the Netherlands’ Oudkarspel, the gathering was by no means domestic — in fact, strolling across the tents, one might just about conclude the event were hosted in Germany instead.
What best stood out at the event was the massive amount of work that went into organizing it, alongside its playful nature, with e.g. a sticker-clad beatbox robot carried around the site, and a literal fire wall 🔥.
Historically the Netherlands had been amenable to those testing the security of computer systems, with the domestic ‘hacking law‘ having been ratified only in 1993. Aside from the number of devices per attendee (allegedly at 1.5 — more often than not covered in stickers), local coverage of the event as such emphasized the activist roots of the scene, as forefighters of digital privacy, digital security, and digital autonomy.
And admittedly, despite the overwhelmingly white-collar crowd, the scene would strike one as at least adjacent to the anarchist culture one might usually find at squat cafes. This included for example its gender-non-conforming contingent (yours truly no exception), with a pond at the terrain having been marked on the event map as Gulf of Blahaj.
Moreover tho, there was its aforementioned emphasis on volunteers and self-sufficiency, which also makes for the core of the open-source software and hardware movements — while most food options available on-site were still commercial (with stands offering free fries/pancakes attracting long lines), one bigger tent erected within the event terrain functioned as an internal supermarket.
Given the side of the event one would generally only be able to experience part of the event’s 100-ish locations including a party stage, hardware modding, an arcade hall (with part of the gaming machines in Japanese), a sauna, some geographic contingents, a volunteer-based chaos mail service delivering messages throughout the event(s) ‘at the speed of chaos’, a karaoke bar, a ‘USA refugee camp’, a dancing space, halls hosting several tracks covering workshops, talks and entertainment, pyrotechnics show symphony of fire (😻) featuring tesla coils to play music from the likes of Mega Man, Nirvana, Super Mario, ACDC, Star Wars and Batman — as well as, most relevant for our purposes, a NixOS tent (courtesy of @lassulus).
Aside from getting to see new and familiar faces again, this also gave me the opportunity to meet Clan’s @hsjobeki to discuss challenges on Nix GUIs, get valuable advice on technical architecture from @raitobezarius, get a sense of what other Nixers were hacking on, borrow a tent for my stay (thanks @arianvp! 🙏).
Halfway through my stay also marked the filing of NixOS’s contracts RFC, offering me something to further review and hack while building upon our earlier efforts from ZHF 25.05, in a setting that allowed me to gather some feedback from other Nixers there as well. I’ve personally been kind of exciting about this development, which would expand not just what’s possible in NixOS, but I believe would offer an important step toward our long-term ambition of normalizing data portability for NixOS-based services as well.
Finally, the event also allowed us to run into some of the NLNet people to hang out and catch up.
While this was my first time at this line of events, I definitely ended up feeling right at home, and am looking forward to attend again in the future.