Cross Pollination; it's not just for bees...

While I was at AppSecDC 2010 - I got into a great conversation with John Steven from Cigital about a great number of things. One of those, and something that I have been openly preaching for years now, is the need for the developers and security professionals to start talking to each other, start interacting, and most importantly start teaching each other.

There are a select few people, like myself, that are kind of double-agents. I have spent the last 5 years as a Senior Software Engineer and I did security - now I am an Application Security Engineer and I do development. At no one point in time have I seen these as opposites, and I think they compliment each other quite well.

What I would really like to see in both communities is people branching out and not only learning but working to solve problems in both. Developers attending security conferences, giving talks at security conferences about subjects like agile/xp, build systems, continuous integration, frameworks, and writing good code - conversely security professionals at development conferences, giving talks on code review, security testing, tools and frameworks, and giving cool demos.

I have started to see this adopted slowly by both OWASP conferences and the NFJS tour. Uberconf had a day long track that was almost purely security related information - but we need more community involvement. It is hard to justify an entire track dedicated to development at an OWASP conference if there will only be 5-10 people attending it. It is up to the community to start expressing an interest in this concept of cross pollination.

I envision a conference with the following people attending:

* Developers
* QA Analysts
* Security Engineers
* Configuration Managers
* IT Managers

And the following tracks:

* Development and Architecture
* Offensive Security
* Defensive Security
* Metrics and Reporting

Moreover, I would love to see more coming out of these tracks then just a bunch of people sitting around talking. I want to see people actually working together to accomplish things. Presenters designing a project that can be done - or taking an existing project and working on it.

It's funny because almost every conference I have been too - I almost always think to myself, here we have a building with 100-200 of the smartest people in and we are missing the opportunity to build things - make cool new discoveries - and invent technologies.

After my conversations with John last week I am convinced that we can start to make some of these things happen and a couple of us have already taken the first steps in putting some pretty cool ideas together.

If you would like to see this happen too, raise your hand - we can always use more people in the community bringing in new voices and ideas.