---
title: Bornhack
description: I spent a week in a tent with my computer.
---

[Bornhack](http://bornhack.dk) is a hacker camp inspired by the [Chaos
Communication Camp](https://events.ccc.de/category/camp/) that takes
place on Bornholm, a rocky island in the Baltic that improbably still
belongs to Denmark.  The camp consists of a bunch of hackers sitting
in tents and holding presentations for each other.  Bornhack has been
held since 2016, but I had been prevented from attending the first two
years.  This year, I was dead set on attending, even though it
entailed missing a [symphonic orchestra playing video game
music](https://drkoncerthuset.dk/event/gaming-in-symphony-3/).

I bought an extremely cheap tent (About 10€) and an only slightly more
expensive self-inflating sleeping pad.  This would turn out to be a
mistake - when we were struck by a brief rainstorm on the second day,
the stress of worrying about whether the tent would remain intact far
outweighed the savings.  Further, I barely got any sleep the first two
nights, as my body did not adjust easily to such poor conditions.  I
function poorly on a sleep deficit, so I would likely have returned
home prematurely had body not finally accepted that this was the new
reality.  (Bornhack also rents out shared cottages, which I might take
advantage of next year.)

Bornhack is organised into *villages*.  This is apparently a common
term at hacking camps, but it is not something my friends and I were
familiar with, and we thought they were a quasi-mandatory level of
organisation.  As a result, we ended up creating our own three-man
village, complete with a rickety pavilion (which became a half-height
pavilion after a storm broke the legs off), dangling power cords, and
an absence of artificial lighting.  During the evenings, we either sat
hacking in the dark, or leeched on the light of more competently run
villages, like some form of techno-vampire.

As mentioned above, Bornhack hosts a fairly large [collection of
technical presentations](https://bornhack.dk/bornhack-2018/program/).
Most of these were on networks, security, or general paranoia, none of
which are among my core interests.  However, I did manage to give a
decent [talk on
Futhark](https://bornhack.dk/bornhack-2018/program/#/event/futhark-a-data-parallel-pure-functional-programming-language-compiling-to-gpu),
and [Niels](http://metanohi.name) gave an [amazing
presentation](https://bornhack.dk/bornhack-2018/program/#/event/big-banko-scaling-for-the-elder-generation)
on [OpenBanko](https://github.com/diku-dk/openbanko).  A [presentation
on contributing to
Debian](https://bornhack.dk/bornhack-2018/program/#/event/debian-for-contributing-hackers-ask-me-anything)
also motivated me to try to get Futhark included in Debian.  All of
the presentations were streamed live and are [now available on
YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsfj7Re_0IG9knJsfzNEnjw)
(where the presenter consented).  I was very impressed with
the video team - they really knew what they were doing.

Overall, Bornhack was great fun.  I talked to interesting people, saw
cool talks, and got some hacking done on my own (in
[Go](http://golang.org), but that is a different story).  I will
definitely try to attend again next year.