Hack Northwest

Come for an hour. Or stay both days. HackNorthwest is a hands-on security & AI conference in downtown Tacoma on October 5–6, 9am–4pm both days. Four rooms run at the same time. Nothing is locked, there's no schedule to follow, and nobody sits through slides. You walk between rooms as it suits you — come for one session on your lunch break, or spend both days. Bring a laptop. Track 1 — Hacking the Enterprise, with Rod Soto Methodologies, processes, attack vectors, tooling, and AI-assisted techniques used for exploitation across infrastructure, web, and cloud environments. Rod is a long-time security practitioner and this is the most advanced room of the two days. Advanced. Paid add-on, limited capacity. Track 2 — Advanced Claude: agentic workflows Leave with your own Claude rebuilt. We set it up on the laptop you bring: custom skills you write yourself, subagents running in parallel, open-sourced visual workspaces for Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode, and Graphify turning a repo into a knowledge graph you can ask questions of. You walk out with it working — not with notes about it. Taught by Stan Steenhuis. Building AI systems on AWS since 2023 — rocket software at Blue Origin, security and compliance at Alpine Investors. Currently a penetration tester of AI systems in financial software. Advanced. Included with general admission. Track 3 — Play with local LLMs Open-weight models running off the cloud. Offline inference, what local does better than an API, and where it falls down. Hardware provided — you don't need a GPU rig to take part. Intermediate. Included with general admission. Track 4 — Getting started with AI ChatGPT and Claude from scratch: setting up Pro accounts properly, prompting fundamentals, and your first genuinely useful workflows. Bring someone who's never done any of this. That's who this room is for. Beginner. Included with general admission. Who this is for Developers, students, security professionals, and anyone curious enough to open a laptop. The beginner room genuinely starts at zero; the Rod Soto room genuinely doesn't. Both are happening at the same time, so a team or a pair can split up and each get what they came for. What you need to bring A laptop and something you're curious about. That's it. Accounts and setup are covered in Track 4 if you're starting cold, and Track 3's hardware is provided.