Report on my first FOSDEM!
I finally attended FOSDEM, THE Open Source event in Europe - here's a quick recap
FOSDEM
FOSDEM has been there for a while (see their Wikipedia page): the first event happened in 2000, which means we are at the 23rd edition (including 2 virtual editions in 2021 and 2022 because of COVID).
FOSDEM is broken down in several tracks:
- talks
- stands
- devrooms
The event happens at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) across several University buildings.
Finally attending it!
Missed opportunities
I wanted to go to FOSDEM for a long time, but every time, the timing did not
work.
The only time it would have worked out was last year, but the event was 100%
virtual.
So I'm glad this year's FOSDEM went back to "normal".
A well organised event
Of course, being the 20+th edition, everything is well oiled, even though you
still have this feeling of "geek" event.
From the different rooms / auditoriums, to the session that has to start right
on time (not 30 seconds in advance) because it's being recorded and timestamped,
the whole thing feels super well organized.
That doesn't mean that you don't have to self-organise: there's a lot of popular sessions, so if you really want to attend, you better show in advance to secure a seat, otherwise you'll just have to stand up... or queue for quite some time outside the room.
Conferences + Social
FOSDEM is all bout technical talks, with plenty of different topics - anything
you can think of, you'll certainly find it at FOSDEM.
But it's also about socialising - with old friends/colleagues you haven't seen a
while ago, or with new folks you meet there.
(You may wonder: "how does he know, since it was his first FOSDEM?" - well,
that's the same as other industry events I'm going to, such as FrNOG, UKNOF,
RIPE, ...).
In my case, I had a pretty busy schedule before showing up, since I wanted to
touch base with a lot of friends from Pine64/PineTime/InfiniTime, as well as the
Sailfish OS community and Jolla employees, not to mention the DNS folks since
there was a DNS devroom.
So plenty of peope to catch up with.
I tweeted when I was on my way to FOSDEM, and when arriving on Friday evening, I had already a few more folks that pinged me to meet!
Pre-event
I arrived in Brussels on Friday, and the plan for the evening was to meet with JF, the lead developper of InfiniTime, PineTime's firmware - if you have no idea what InfiniTime or PineTime is, I highly encourage you to read my blog posts about it.
I headed to the pub where JF told me he was, and I met TL Lim, Pine64's founder,
who's a super nice guy, very passionated about what Pine64 is doing.
We had a few beers, discussing current projects at Pine64 - not only the
PineTime, but also the newest PineBuds, Pine64's earbuds - always interesting to
get "back stories", especially about the PineBuds, as there's a lot of audio
tweaking involved.
We then went to a Chinese restaurant, where we met Lukasz (Pine64's EU owner) and his daughter and wife. I also got to know Marek (Pine64 Community Manager), as well as Kamil (who's working on Pine64 SOCs).
Obviously, there were a lot of people wearing a PineTime, so I couldn't resist and we took the below picture:
I tweeted it , joking about the fact there were too many PineTimes in this picture. Someone answered that this looked pretty much like a Power Rangers meeting ^^
Day 1
Running in Brussels!
Of course I had brought my running gear, and I went for nice long run in
Brussels - more precisly to the Joseph Zwaenepoel Forest
Reserve.
That was definitely a good start of a day, but since I didn't specially woke up
early, the morning passed by and it was time to go to FOSDEM!
Arriving at FOSDEM
My hotel was from a walking distance, so I just walked to the venue.
The FOSDEM's website is well done, with a map straight on the homepage. I later
discovered that David's excellent FOSDEM Sailfish OS application also included
this map :)
I first headed to building H to say Hi to the Jolla folks but couldn't find them, so instead I headed to building AW to say Hi to the Pine64 folks. They were quite busy, including JF who was discussing with a few folks - he later told me that he was nicely surprised that folks recognised him and engaged with him - that just shows how great InfiniTime has become!
Thaodan's presentation about Sailfish OS ports
Björn (Thaodan on the SFOS forums) had a presentation about porting Sailfish OS to non-official Sony Xperia devices (5, 1, 1ii), as part of the "FOSS on mobile devices".
Björn (re)presented Sailfish OS, and explained what is Sony's Open Device program.
He then talked about how porting SFOS to those devices was.
The talk duration was just 15 minutes, so a bit short to cover everything, but it was a good conversation starter and (I think) helped with dragging people to the Sailfish OS stand later.
Lunch!
Since I arrived late, it was already time to grab some lunch - which was good since I didn't have breakfast, so with a long run in the morning, I was really starving!
Lucien (Sfiet_Konstantin) pinged me on Telegram to have lunch, and we queued to
grab some Belgian fries - and met JF who was also queueing :)
It was really rush hour, so even with 3 queues at the fries foodtruck, it took
us 20 minutes to get our food.
Lucien had some talks he didn't want to miss, so I had lunch with JF - we discussed a lot about many topics, I'm glad we finally met face to face, after more than 2 years interacting remotely :)
Also, Lucien insisted that we must try Club Mate - he event sent me this
link
with the "FOSDEM laws" :)
I had one, and while I can't say I hate it, it's not the best drink I ever had -
but I get that people are having it to get caffeine after a short night of
sleep.
DNS devroom
My Saturday afternoon was spent in the DNS devroom, with plenty of nice talks (highlighting here the ones I preferred):
- Parsing zone files really fast, by Jeroen Koekkoek
- or how to speed up parsing, super important for large zones, but also since you need to reload zones when they're changed
- DNS for I2P: a Distributed Network without Central Authority, by Konrad Bächler
- a fun student project, used in Switzerland
- Why resolving two names in a GUI program is hard, by Petr Menšík
- or how to deal with GUI being blocked on name resolution
- Implementation of the Drink server: programming details, by Stéphane
Bortzmeyer
- as usual with Stéphane, a fun presentation and explanations about why he did that
- I asked Stéphane why it was called Drink, and the reason is that most (all?) programs in Elixir have a name related to alcohol.
Peter (@Habbie) was the moderator, and Pieter (@_lieter) was managing the
questions through the IRC/Matrix channels.
I also met with Remi (@rgacogne), which means that with Otto (which I didn't
see) there were a bunch of ex -PowerDNS colleagues/friends in that room (which
should come as no surprise, as after all it was a DNS devroom).
I left before the end, as I had to head to the dinner.
Sailfish OS dinner
We then headed to Brussels' "Grand Place" with Andrew and a few other SFOS
enthusiasts.
Andrew had booked at "Café Georgette" a few weeks ago, and since then he kept
teasing about how great their Belgian fries (he called them "frites" in proper
French) were.
We were 26 people spread across 3 tables, and even though noone arrived at the same time and there were changes in the food pre-ordering we had done, the restaurant's owner did a great job and we really enjoyed the beer and food.
I personally had a "Welsh" which was really great, and a lot less fat than what I already had in France.
Of course, we confirmed to Andrew that the Frites were awesome - the owner explained that they were fried in beef oil twice, which is what makes the difference.
There were a few "surprises" during the dinner:
- Raine had brought a few Jolla 1 leftover: batteries, screens, cameras, The Other Halves
- Bob managed to buy a pack of NeoFreeRunner for almost nothing on eBay, and
gave one to Carol, Lucien and Ruben. Quite a gift, and nice to see this device
again, 14 years afterwards (it was "released" in 2008).
You can see it in action here and here's how the box looks like:
Lucien and Ruben enjoying their NeoFreeRunner :)
Day 2
Contrac - Tracing app on SFOS - David's lightning talk
On Sunday morning at 9:20 (yes, that's early!), David presented on his
implementation of the aforementioned app.
Even though it was early, quite a few people showed up and asked (good)
questions at the end.
I'll cover the talk in more details in my blog article about Jolla at Sailfish OS.
FastNetMon
Pavel was there to present FastNetMon in the Network track.
A much bigger room than the other ones, and it was packed.
I bumped into Remi who also wanted to see this presentation.
I've seen Pavel presenting at a few conferences, including UKNOF - but it's always a pleasure to see him.
This time, you could tell it was less a network event than an Open Source one - Pavel explained at high level what is a DDoS, and what FastNetMon provides.
Still, very fun as usual, with some good references:
Gitlab forge in the French Education
A nice presentation by Alexis Kauffmann, founder of Framasoft.
He said his presentation got written by ChatGPT - I'm not sure this was true, but since it seems to be trendy these days, I think it was.
The talk was generic and explained what has been deployed for teachers to create content, mostly using Markdown and mkdocs.
FOSSbot
A 3D-printed robot project, with off-the-shelf hardware (RPi, ...) aimed at teaching code to kids, teenagers and students.
Very interesting and fun.
Tableaunoir
Probably the presentation I liked the most, not only because of the project, but also the presenter, François Schwarzentruber, who was very energetic and fun.
In a nutshell, Tableaunoir is an online black board which can be shared, for teachers and students to collaborate.
Where Tableaunoir differs from other solutions:
- the whole "toolbar" can be hidden because the aim is to have a product which is super intuitive to use,
- there's nothing logged on the server, (almost) everything happens on the client side
- it is also possible to create slides and animations with Tableaunoir
- in fact, François used Tableaunoir to create his own presentation
- he made a live demo to show it in action - which is very brave, as we're talking about a product that needs Internet, so I wouldn't trust the FOSDEM connectivity as I'd be sure I would it the "demo syndrome" :) but it worked beautifully!
Lunch
Remi and I then had lunch, and since it was pretty early (12:30pm), it was not rush hour yet, so we got our fries and burger quickly, and then sat down in the cafeteria to eat and talk - which was nice, since we didn't really have a chance to do it the day before, and I hadn't seen Remi since our trail run in Fontainebleau last summer.
Sailfish OS BoF
It was then time to head to the SFOS BoF.
For those not familiar, BoF stands for "Birds of a Feather", and as
Urbandictionary puts it,
"it is social interaction groups that meet, either online, or in community, or in
person at other venues".
There really is no structure, so we just met in a room, with Andrew, Raine and Björn running the show.
(As for David's presentation, I'll be covering this BoF in more details in my upcoming blog article about Jolla at FOSDEM).
Leaving FOSDEM
Before leaving, I briefly met with Pieter to discuss a bit more, since I just waved at him the day before in the DNS devroom as he was busy - good to catch up and hopefully I see him at the upcoming RIPE meeting in Rotterdam!
I also went to say goodbye to JF who was hanging out nearby the Pine64 stand, and told him to say goodbye on my behalf to to the Pine64 guys as they were busy.
I had tried to meet Quentin and Steven from CleverCloud the whole weekend (we
even set a Telegram channel) but to no avail.
When onboard my Thalys, I messaged them to say we'd meet at the next FrNOG, but
it turned out that they were in the same Thalys, so I met Quentin at the bar
carriage (Steven was sleeping) along with some VideoLan folks - never too late
to meet at FOSDEM ^^
Wrap Up
What an event! It went slightly differently than what I expected, but that's alright :)
I was expecting to attend a lot more conferences, but I had a few folks I wanted to meet or catch up with, so as usual during those events, you need to choose between socialising and attending talks.
Concluding by "it's mission: accomplished" is maybe a bit too much, but that's genuinely what I think as I'm typing those words on my bluetooth keyboard connected to my Xperia 10iii :)
Tags: Opensource, SailfishOS, PineTime