---
title: More Adventures at FOSDEM
description: Based on how much I enjoyed FOSDEM last year, it entirely unsurprising that I ended up going again this year!
publishedDate: 2025-02-03
tags:
    - irl
---

```{figure} collage.jpg
:alt: A collage of images

Left to right, top to bottom: the Brussels Metro, a very full Janson auditorium, special 25-years FOSDEM hard candy, a very busy food court, cheapo hotel breakfast, a fun sticker
```

# Less planes, more trains

Since we were booking very early this year (basically as soon as the FOSDEM dates were confirmed), it actually made financial sense to book the Eurostar to go between London and Brussels and back instead of flying.

Despite being the ostensibly more expensive and therefore better option, I don't think I'd hurry back to the Eurostar. It was, like, *fine*, I guess. The trains in particular were quite nice (see [/trains](/trains) for a detailed run-down), but the whole experience was let down by the waiting areas.

In both London and Brussels, once you pass through security and passport control, you're plonked in a fairly close-quarters area with minimal stuff to do - you got a duty free shop and a place to get light refreshments, and nothing else. That'd be fine if you were only there for a little while, but in the case of London, they ask you to please arrive an hour before your train leaves, so as a by-product you're just stuck in a big room with nothing to do for ages.

At least with flying, you've got plenty of space to roam, lots of places to shop and eat and less time in a sealed metal tube (50 minutes versus 2 hours or so).

It's a shame - Eurostar for all intents and purposes should be the default option to cross the English channel, but it's let down by the experience.

# In Brussels

Broadly speaking, our setup this year was very similar to last year. Arrive on the Friday, sleep, attend a day of conference and follow it up with a meal with friends, have another sleep, go to another day of conference, leave the closing ceremony early and head home on the latest transport option on the Sunday. 

We stayed in the same hotel in the European quarter as last year, I breakfasted on (basically the same) cereal out of coffee cups instead of paying for the expensive hotel breakfast and we ate our evening meals at the same place in city centre. Why change a winning combination?

# At FOSDEM

This year in particular was a somewhat special FOSDEM - marking 25 years of the conference taking place. It had a particularly cute logo and I'm very happy to say I have a hoodie with it on.

> HOODIE PHOTOS HERE

I was a little more prepared for the sheer quantity of people this time around. I expected big queues and the prospect of not being able to get into the interesting talks, tried to pace myself a bit better and made sure to eat and drink properly. It made the experience more pleasant, despite the fact that I was also suffering somewhat from a cold[^1].

Here is a list of the talks I went and watched this year:

## Saturday

* [What's new in Nextcloud?](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4515-what-s-new-in-nextcloud-/) - Jos Poortvliet
    * I don't know a lot about Nextcloud - this is a talk I was dragged along to by [Matt](https://carrotmanmatt.com) but that I enjoyed nonetheless, as someone who's slowly in the process of setting up more of a home filestore server
    * Nextcloud is a self-hosted answer to Microsoft Office 365 - far beyond just the file server I thought it was
    * It's got a lot going on, alongside some interesting uses of AI, including for suspicious login detection.
* [Poppler - the PDF rendering library](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6000-poppler-the-pdf-rendering-library/) - Albert Astals Cid
    * A whistlestop tour of the history of the PDF rendering library that's at the heart of a lot of Linux desktop OSes
    * It turns out PDF rendering is hard (no way!!)
    * Poppler is old, but not as old as xpdf, which is a commercial non-library that was forked to turn it into a library
    * It's got a small, very niche community surrounding it which is a little worrying considering it's a very depeneded upon piece of software
    * If you have hardware to donate to run regression tests on, they want it
* [Scaniverse Universal Scanner Drivers: One Solution for Every Distro](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6435-scaniverse-universal-scanner-drivers-one-solution-for-every-distro/) - Akarshan Kapoor
    * An interesting talk fighting the good fight to bring scanners under the same, modern driver stack that powers printing on Linux
* [Ladybird - a new independent browser written from scratch](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4132-ladybird-a-new-independent-browser-written-from-scratch/) - Jelle Raaijmakers
    * A little bit about the new Ladybird browser engine, something that spawned from [Andreas Kling](https://awesomekling.com/)'s [Serenity OS project](https://serenityos.org/)
    * At this point, the project is actually picking up quite fast, with targets to produce an alpha release next year and beta and stable releases in the not-too-distant future.
    * Currently, Ladybird has the second-most standards complient JS engine on planet earth! (As per [test262.fyi](https://test262.fyi/#))
    * The talk was complete with a if-it-can-go-wrong-it-will-go-wrong demo
* [Typed HTML in my Python?](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6595-typed-html-in-my-python-/) - Athena Wolfskämpf
    * Discusses an approach to generating HTML in Python using [htpy](https://htpy.dev/), without the use of regular templating engines
    * This is an approach I've used in Go a fair amount and one that I have... opinions about
    * htpy, though, looks like the best implementation I've seen - with some clever quality-of-life things like allowing you to specify IDs and classes in CSS selector syntax and using Python's inherently very dynamic typing to seamlessly support web components
* [Immich: Self-hosted photo and video management solution](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5052-immich-self-hosted-photo-and-video-management-solution/) - The Immich Team
    * I was *aware* of Immich before FOSDEM, but since I've come away, I've invested in new hardware to actually run it for myself
    * Immich is a novel, self-hosted Google Photos clone and it's *excellent* and only getting better
    * It not only manages your photo library but has interesting AI features that replicate some of the magic Google photos does for you
* [14 Years of systemd](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6648-14-years-of-systemd/) - Lennart Poettering
    * systemd is really, really young?? and it's ***~150 binaries?!*** but somehow not huge?? (a full install is 36MB vs. 8MB for bash alone)
    * This talk covered the birth of systemd and the quirks of the environment it operates in
    * For example, you've got to keep hard dependencies low since you need this to run nearly everywhere, and you're also not going to be using all the components in all the places - so much of the optional dependencies are loaded lazily, as and when needed

## Sunday

0900 advanced python parsing

- cases do so much more than I thought!
- structural pattern matching

0930 python monorepos

- splitting monorepos into the folders bases, components and projects

1000 alt text for images

- very hard to check for good alt text automatically
- also deduplication
- no good open source tool
- now there's an open source tool! actually multiple lol
- also finally a good use for ai?!

1050 blocking badly behaving bots

- 150 slides, 6 seconds a slide??
- random secrets using regezes
- random data from json schemas (and every other format and protocol)
- honeypot?
- gaming bot timeouts
- "is this moral? ehhhh I think it's funny"
- gossip and clustering
- INFINITE FTP w/ 1 sec delays

1140 measure what you manage 

- eh

1300 was leslie lamport right?


1400 lessons learned from open sourcing the UK contract tracing app

- nhsx and the intention to release open source stuff
- founded a year before 2020
- app going great until the press conference
- "what does it mean when your county's health policy is controlled by apple and Google?"
- "working in the open makes you a target. working for the government makes you fair game, in some people's eyes"
- squashing history in between each release
- professional moderators sometimes a win

apple thing

1630 fosdem infra

1700 10 years of let's encrypt 

- ari
- 6 figure+ db servers
- 4.5m USD predicted 2025 cost 

## Swag Haul

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[^1]: I may or may not have been one of the people that (unknowingly) bought FOSDEM flu to FOSDEM...