On February 1st and 2nd I attended https://fosdem.org/2020/ and this post is my summary of attending the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting in Brussels.
The two day event is huge, held on a university campus it spans multiple buildings and has 8,000+ attendeees. There are 30+ rooms in operation from large auditoriums for keynotes through to smaller rooms for specific topics.
There are also vendor and project stands from people like Linux distros and lnaguages like my beloved Perl and hardware provider Pine64 showing their watch and laptops.
The biggest problem with FOSDEM is you miss more than you can attend. This is offset somewhat from the amazing video recording effort the organisers put in. Pretty much every talk is recorded and posted online, so you can catch up.
I attended with a small group of current and former colleague developers. This made for a very enjoyable weekend, thanks all chaps!
The talks I attended varied, I found sitting in the lightning talks room really good as you got a lot of content in ashort amount of time. The 15 minute talk format works great as it’s long enough to get a good feel for if the topic is of interest. If it is not, the 15 minutes is short enough you don’t get cross you have missed lots to see the talk. The longer talks do have the problem that if it was a bad choice you lose a large percentage of your 2 days.
The amount of talks can be stressful and is exhausting; you have spent time and money to get there so you try to see all you can… even if it leaves you exhausted.
Fortunately almost everything is available online after the event which helps with the FOMO. Here are some talks I liked, attended, or wanted to attend or people have discussed.
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/software_freedom/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/libreoffice_turns_ten/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/http3/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/kapow_web_framework/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/kde_itinerary/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/gate_portable_execution_state/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/fosdem_infrastructure/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/capitalismethicaloss/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/choosing_the_right_deployment_strategy/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_dat_browser/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/rakulang/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/om_liquidsoap/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/om_audio_streaming/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/open_research_joss/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/coi/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/security_threat_modelling_for_developers/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/weave_net_an_open_source_container_network/
- https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/testing_writing_go_tests/
This list is just some I want to archive.
FOSDEM was great, but exhausting. I will go again; but most definitely will give myself more space and time. I.e. staying in the city for at least another day to chill.
If you have an interest in anything Open SOurce, it’s well worth attend.
See you in 2021.
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