Balccon has been a conference I’ve wanted to attend since before COVID.
My good friends Zoz and Joe Grand had recommended this small, “super hacker-style” conference in Serbia, and it had been on my radar ever since. The organizers, Jelena and Milos, had also been incredibly gracious about inviting me to speak.
We actually started talking about it before COVID, and just as we had everything sorted out, COVID hit and the world came to a grinding halt.
September is always a difficult time for me because it comes right after summer camp—Black Hat and DEF CON—and my schedule is usually a mess.
Last year, I finally thought I was going to make it to this elusive hacker con in the Balkans.
Then life threw another banana peel in front of me.
Earlier that year, my landlord told me they wanted to move back into the place I was living in. They were gracious enough to give us almost a year’s notice, so my wife and I started looking for a new home.
Finding housing in Tokyo is already difficult enough, but we have a dog and a cat. A lot of properties allow one pet, but very few allow “multiple pets.” Property owners tend to worry that the animals will breed, destroy the property, or create problems with the neighbors.
So, while I was trying to figure out whether I could make Balccon work, I got a call from our real estate agent saying they had found a few properties.
My wife and I went to look at them, and there was one place I really liked.
The agent explained that it was going through renovations and should be available at the end of September.
Fuck.
Then the agent told us it was a popular listing. We were second on the waiting list, and if the first candidate fell through, we would get the contract—but we would have to sign immediately because the owner wanted to avoid any “blank period” between tenants.
Double fuck.
My wife and I talked it through and decided we wanted the place.
Heavy-hearted, I contacted Jelena and told her I was sorry, but once again I wouldn’t be able to make it to Balccon 2025.
A year went by.
Then Jelena contacted me again.
“Can you make it this year? Balccon 2026?”
I looked at my calendar. It was tight, but this time I could make it.
So I finally said yes.
She asked if I would give a talk.
I’m often hesitant to speak at security conferences because most of what I do doesn’t really apply to many “infosec professionals.”
I’m a hacker, not an infosec professional.
I don’t have any “yet-to-be-publicly-disclosed vulnerabilities,” because I don’t really look for them.
Jelena and I talked through some ideas and eventually settled on a topic: a personal journey through my life as a hacker, along with some of the gadgets and projects I’ve built over the years.
## Serbia
Serbia has always had a strange mystique for me. For some reason, this part of the world is somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for a long time.
And as a soccer fan, Serbia also has a special connection to Japan.
It gave Japanese soccer Dragan Stojković—Pixy.
I love soccer, and Japanese soccer fans love Pixy. He played and coached in Japan, and I genuinely feel that he helped raise Japanese soccer to another level during a time when Japan was still struggling to become internationally competitive.
But back to Balccon.
I finally boarded my plane.
Tokyo → Helsinki → Amsterdam → Belgrade → Novi Sad.
After a very long trip, I landed at Belgrade Airport.
I walked outside with my suitcase and started looking for my pickup. While I was waiting, another person came over and asked:
“Are you here for Balccon?”
Turns out he was another attendee waiting for the “Hacker Taxi.”
Apparently, I looked like “one of us.”
A few minutes later, two more people joined us.
My large aluminum suitcase, covered with “Safety Third” and “Hacker” stickers—both available from StickerThePlanet (https://stickerthepla.net), by the way—turned out to be a pretty good meetup sign.
It was about 1:00 a.m.
Four hackers from different countries climbed into a relatively small car and headed down a pitch-black highway toward Novi Sad.
The whole thing felt slightly surreal.
I remember thinking:
This is exactly how a bad horror movie starts.
Around 2:00 a.m., we reached the hotel, checked in, and I crashed onto my bed.
Tomorrow—or technically just a few hours later—was Day One.
## Opening Day
Before completely passing out, I checked the conference schedule.
I was the opening talk.
Oh.
Yeah.
So I went over my presentation one more time to make sure the flow worked.
The next morning, I headed over to the convention center. Unlike the night before, I could actually see Novi Sad and all the little details I had missed in the darkness.
The colors were different. The buildings were different. Store signs were written in Cyrillic, and I found myself guessing what everything meant.
Yeah.
I was somewhere I had never been before.
When we arrived at the convention center, the staff was still setting things up. An LED-lit entrance gate was going up, and I was escorted into the speaker room.
As I was meeting some of the other speakers and organizers, I suddenly heard a loud voice behind me with a very distinct Australian accent:
“Oh my God, is that the most famous Mexican hacker, Kentaro?”
I knew that voice.
I turned around and hugged my good friend Zoz.
It had been years since we had seen each other.
I went over to check my presentation setup and immediately confirmed something else:
Yes, I was definitely in Europe.
The podium was so high that I barely cleared it.
## The Talk
The conference started.
Jelena opened Balccon and introduced me.
My talk was a personal story about hacking, my own journey, and why I believe hackers still matter in a world increasingly filled with AI vibe coding and AI slop.
My talk was the opening keynote, and one of the ideas I talked about was that I think “everything is hacking,” and that everyone is, in some sense, a hacker.
To me, hacking is primarily a mental exercise. It is an exercise in imagination.
AI can help us find problems.
AI can help us solve problems.
But I’m not convinced AI can truly imagine problems.
Hopefully the talk eventually appears on the Balccon YouTube channel.
I always feel like an imposter when I give talks.
I don’t really think of myself as someone with valuable wisdom to give other people.
But at the same time, I have to take my own medicine:
Sharing your ideas and giving talks is one of the best ways to find other people who think like you.
My talk went better than I expected.
People came up afterward and thanked me, which meant a lot.
One great thing about speaking early at a conference is that once your talk is finished, you can actually enjoy the conference.
Afterward, I went back to the speaker room, dropped off my stuff, and thought:
Okay.
Time to have fun.
Balccon had a hacker space where people were soldering their conference badges and trying to make them blink. Other tables were dedicated to different hacker activities.
Next to the speaker room was an entire room full of retro computers: ZX Spectrums, various Commodore models, and all sorts of old hardware.
And they weren’t sitting behind glass.
They worked.
People were using them, playing games, repairing them, and experiencing the machines.
## What Balccon Feels Like
What struck me most about Balccon was how kind everyone was.But more than that, people were hungry for knowledge.If you looked purely at some of the hardware and equipment available, you might think it was far removed from what you would see at a large conference in the United States.
But that completely misses the point.
Balccon doesn’t have much of the over-the-top marketing you see at larger events, largely because the conference is self-funded.
There are no giant vendor booths.
The volunteers actually seem to enjoy volunteering.
Many of them are young—both in actual age and in spirit.
If you remember the pre-convention-center era of DEF CON, imagine taking one of those hallways late at night, where everyone was sitting around on the floor sharing ideas, hacks, stories, and stupid jokes.
Balccon has that feeling.
Nothing flashy. Just people hanging around. You don’t feel like you need to attend every talk to be “doing the conference correctly.” You don’t need to hack everything.
You can just wander around and talk to other hackers.
No cliques.
No secret handshakes.
No elite badgelife show-offs.
Just a bunch of hackers getting together to have fun, learn things, and help each other.
If you’re the type of person who goes to a conference determined to attend every talk, consume as much “content” as possible, introduce yourself to everyone, and optimize your “infosec network,” Balccon might not be worth the trip.
But if you like tinkering, hacking, talking, building stupid things, sharing ideas, and simply hanging out with other hackers?
Yeah.
Balccon is absolutely worth considering.
## Old Friends
I got to hang out with old friends like Zoz, Iceman, Jo, WillC, Victor,Rob etc etc and many others I’ve run into over the years as a traveling hacker.
Because Balccon is relatively small, I could actually sit down with them.
We could talk.
Share stories.
Tell jokes.
Bounce ideas off each other.
At DEF CON, we might run into each other while everyone is rushing between five different things.
“Hey!”
“Hi!”
“Bye!”
And that’s it.
At Balccon, there was time.
## Hacker Space
The retro computing room was a trip down memory lane for an old-school hacker like me.
ZX Spectrums.
Commodores.
All kinds of old machines.
Everything was powered on and working.
In one corner, people were literally hand-soldering and repairing old hardware.
It was wonderful.
The hacker area had tables where people were soldering badges, lock picking, playing games, building things, and experimenting.
Talks ranged from deeply technical subjects to much more general topics.
Not every talk was in my area of interest, but almost all of them sounded interesting.
More importantly, the speakers genuinely seemed excited to be giving their talks.
And you could feel the audience's hunger for knowledge.
At night, there were silly things—quiz shows, games, random discussions.
I think I got back to the hotel around 3:00 a.m. the first night.
The second night?
Around 5:00 a.m.
That was the thing.
It was just fun.
Talking shop.
Talking nonsense.
Having deeply intellectual conversations immediately followed by discussions about things like toilet penis etiquette.(blame Tony)
It had been a long time since I had sat in a space where people could freely talk about hacking, politics, technology, and random bullshit without feeling like I had to engage.
Sometimes I get tired of being ELKentaro.
Sometimes I just want to be Kentaro.
Seeing old friends and hanging out at Balccon gave me a really nice balance between the two.
## Food, Tomatoes, and Rakia
I’m not a foodie.
I’m perfectly happy eating shitty food or junk food.
But because I’m diabetic, I do have to be a little more careful about what I eat.
The organizers helped me enormously with that.
I imagine that in a country famous for bread and bread-like things, that probably wasn't always easy.
I’m also not a huge fan of raw tomatoes.
But Milos suggested a local salad, and I figured I should at least try it.
It was incredibly simple:
Cucumber.
Tomato.
Cheese.
That was basically it.
And somehow it tasted amazing.
I told Zoz about it.
He said:
“Balkan tomatoes are a religious experience.”
I think he might be right.
I liked the salad so much that I ate two bowls and asked if we could go back to the same place the next day.
Another unique thing about Balccon was the amount of homemade alcohol.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much homemade alcohol at a conference.
Everyone seemed to have their own Rakia.
And everyone was absolutely convinced that their Rakia was the best Rakia.
“My mother made this.”
“This is my grandmother’s recipe.”
“This one is from my family.”
I don’t drink anymore, but I smelled a few of them, and even from that you could tell how different they were.
There was something wonderful about the pride people took in it.
And yes.
A lot of people were getting drunk as fuck.
## Janky Is Good
Looking back at my three days at Balccon, what I found was a group of similarly minded people who simply enjoyed being around each other—and who were incredibly hungry to learn.
They made do with things that a large Western security conference might consider “janky.”
The lock picks at the lock-picking table were literally duct-taped together.
Some of the keyways on the practice locks looked wide enough to qualify as shipping canals.
Nobody cared.
People were picking locks.
People were learning.
People were having fun.
The soldering iron tips looked about as big as Sharpie markers.
Nobody cared.
People were still soldering SMD components and helping each other figure things out.
There was even an embroidery workshop combining circuit building with embroidery.All of this existed together in one space full of hackers.
And it was wonderful.
I got to spend time with old friends and many others.Somehow, all of us seemed less stressed.
Everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy simply hanging out.
Like I said, it reminded me of sitting on the carpet in a hallway late at night at one of the earlier hacker conferences.
That feeling is becoming increasingly rare.
## A Gem
Jelena, Milos, and their entire team have created a genuine gem of a conference in a small corner of Serbia.
Balccon reminded me of why I started going to hacker conferences in the first place.
Not for vendors.
Not for “content.”
Not for networking metrics.
Not for badges.
Not to prove how elite anyone is.
But because getting a bunch of curious people together in the same place and giving them permission to build things, break things, talk, learn, laugh, and share ideas can be something special.
I hope I get to come back one day.
Thank you, Serbia.
Thank you, Balccon.
You reignited something in me.
And you inspired me.
Photo album of images from my Balccon adventure: https://buymeacoffee.com/elkentaro/balccon-2026-5134103
