Snyk takes over Boston for SnykWeek

It was a party with Patch when we hosted SnykWeek: Boston at the Boston Park Plaza hotel. It was also the first in-person event Snyk has ever hosted! It was a week of learning, networking, and hacking — all centered around developer security. Our goal was to introduce developers of all skill levels and backgrounds to Snyk’s powerful platform, while also sharing knowledge and having some fun.

Snyk takes over South Station.

We started by making our presence known all over the city. Snyk popped up on several billboards around Boston, signage at South Station, free coffee in Copley Square and at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and a Snyk taco truck in the Seaport district… where we encouraged everyone to “taco ‘bout” developer security!

Free tacos!

Developer Day

On Developer Day (Wednesday, May the 4th be with you!), Snyk’s Director of DevSecOps Acceleration, Micah Silverman, gave a talk on Developer Security Essentials. Micah took a deep dive into how to enable developers to catch security issues earlier in the lifecycle without having to become security experts themselves — and discussed the culture, processes, and tools necessary to make that happen.

Micah talks security strategy for developers.

Developer Day’s most interactive event was our developer challenge: Hack with Patch! Developers were given access to Snyk tools to find and fix vulnerabilities, while a live leaderboard tracked fixes in real time. During this event:

• 19 participants imported at least one new project into Snyk

• 10 of these participants fixed at least one security issue using Snyk

• 618 total security fixes were made by our participants during the one hour we ran the challenge! These included: 33 critical, 127 high, 107 medium, and 351 low severity fixes

Wow! That’s a lot of remediation for only sixty minutes of work! We were so impressed with the progress participants made during this session.

And a huge congratulations to the SnykWeek Boston Best Hacker award winners, Shuchita Mishra and Parth Shukla! Shuchita is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Data Science from Northeastern University, and Parth is a grad student at Northeastern who leads a community focused on educating others on coding, shell scripting, and finding and fixing vulnerabilities. Shuchita said that this was her first time using the Snyk platform, “but not the last time.” She said she found the tools “so easy to use, and well-coded and automated.” Parth said he loved the priority scoring that Snyk provides, making it easy to distinguish between low, medium, and high priority vulnerabilities. During the “Hack with Patch” session, these two superstars found and fixed a total of 73 vulnerabilities using Snyk!

Cultivating developer security

On Thursday, May 5, we talked about cultivating developer security. Simon Maple, Snyk’s Field CTO, shared his new white paper on developer adoption, including some great tips, best practices, and common pitfalls to avoid when encouraging developers to adopt security practices. We also heard great developer adoption stories from our three featured Boston-based customer speakers: Chris Gervais, CTO and CSO at Kyruus, Nicole Holden, Manager of AppSec at Datto Inc., and David Matousek, Director of Global Cybersecurity services at Manulife. Each of these speakers had valuable insights to share on how to bring security into the minds of developers, and how to bring developers to the forefront of security.

Simon’s next session was a lively roundtable discussion. Attendees shared their stories and ideas about today’s most noteworthy security topics, including cloud security, software supply chain security, and how to find and support security champions within an organization.

Who let the dogs out?

On one more “around town” note: we dropped purple Snyk tennis balls in six dog parks around the city... and Boston’s dogs seemed to approve!

Dogs can’t see colors very well, but they can read QR codes.

Thanks, Boston! See you soon, London!

We couldn’t have been more excited to host our first SnykWeek event in Boston, and we extend an enthusiastic thank you to everyone who attended! We’ll be hosting more SnykWeeks around the world, and we’d love to see you there. Up next, SnykWeek: London!