FOSDEM 2020 - My favourite chaos
01 Mar 2020The first weekend of February I visited the the FOSDEM conference for the third year in a row.
FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is a yearly 2-day conference completely focused on free and open source software. This time I had company, 4 colleagues from my then employer R2M had joined me.
FOSDEM is kind of a special conference apart from the complete focus on FOSS.
It is completely free of charge with no requirement or possibility to register in advance. No one knows how many people that will show up and no one knows exactly how many that are there. I asked a volunteer who said that they estimate it to between 5000 and 8000 based on how many devices that connect to the conference WiFi.
This year featured 841 speakers, 873 events and 71 tracks, the tracks are known as “Developer rooms”. To visit everything is utterly impossible, you have to choose wisely and show up in good time to get a seat if it is a popular talk.
Getting into a Developer room can be a bit chaotic, people come from all over the world and have differing opinions on how to queue. For a Swedish person like me, who is used to queue in good order and never ever cut the line for any reason, the first morning can be very stresful before you get used to it.
FOSDEM always takes place at ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and is run by volunteers.
Favourite talks
I went to more than 20 different talks during the conference. To pick favourites is very difficult since there are many interesting topics and almost all talks are on a fairly advanced level.
Saturday
I went out to ULB early and started in the Containers devroom where I saw a couple of talks of which my favourite was Lazy distribution of container images by Akihiro Suda. In the Infra management devroom my favourites were Designing for Failure by Walter Heck and Ephemeral Environments For Developers In Kubernetes by Jeff Knurek. In the main Internet track a favourite was HTTP/3 for everyone by Daniel Stenberg.
Sunday
I started in the Monitoring and Observability devroom where my favourites were Jaegertracing in Ceph by Deepika Upadhyay, Stories around ModBus by Richard Hartmann and Monitoring strawberries by Jean-Marc Davril. In the Freedom devroom Open Source Won, but Software Freedom Hasn’t Yet by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen Sandler + Regaining control of your smartphone with postmarketOS and Maemo Leste by Merlijn B. W. Wajer and Bart Ribbers were the most interesting.
Conclusion
FOSDEM was awesome yet again and I am sure to attend it again in the future. I hope to go again already next year, 2021.
Also as a huge beer geek you can’t go wrong with Brussels.
