---
title: Adventures at FOSDEM
description: I visited FOSDEM in Brussels this year, and here's some of the things I got up to
publishedDate: 2024-02-05
tags: ["irl"]
imageURL: /blog/adventures-at-fosdem/collage.jpg
---
Inspired by some friends around Christmastime of last year, I decided to come along to FOSDEM this year. It's been a delightful albeit chaotic and tiring experience, so here's a little run-down of some of the things I got up to!

![Collage of our outbound plane, another photo of the outbound plane, the Brussels metro, the Monument du Cinquantenaire, the Wolf food hall, my cheapo hotel breakfast, the queues for lunch at ULB, the closing ceremony and the empty return plane](collage.jpg)

*<span class="text--secondary">Left-to-right, top-to-bottom: our outbound plane, another photo of the outbound plane, the Brussels metro, the Monument du Cinquantenaire, the [Wolf food hall](https://maps.app.goo.gl/vKoKN5KMNx8noKgy5) (where we ate most of our evening meals), my cheapo hotel breakfast, the queues for lunch at ULB, the closing ceremony and the empty return plane.</span>*

# Getting there

Because of the relatively late booking that I did for the trip, the most cost effective way of travelling ended up being by plane - specifically Brussels Airlines, leaving from Heathrow. As much as I would have liked to have taken the Eurostar, the difference in ticket price was somewhere in the region of £50 once you factored in the additional rail travel required.

# Getting around

90% of the travel I did while in Brussels was either on the railways, metro or trams. A little researching was required, but the long and short of it is that you can use a contactless card across the STIB-MIVB[^4] network much like you can on the London Underground - just look for the grey touchpoints.

The demand placed on the system was quite amusing - trams to/from the ULB campus (where FOSDEM takes place) were always absolutely rammed and invariably went from completely full to almost entirely empty on arriving at the right place.

# At FOSDEM

FOSDEM itself is spread across multiple buildings on the ULB campus - with everything from seminar rooms to ginormous lecture theatres being used, the vast majority were so-called *devrooms*, hosting talks centred around a specific topic and run by a dedicated team of people.

There were devrooms for all sorts of topics, like big, mainstream languages such as Go, Python and Rust to more niche areas like FOSS mobile devices, LLVM and railways and open transport.

There were also lots of stands around that hosted various open source projects and organisations, like Mozilla[^1], Joplin and Let's Encrypt.

But of course, the main attraction wwre the talks. I went to a few - they were:

* **Day 1**
    * [Screen Sharing on Raspberry Pi 5 Using VNC in Weston and Wayland with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3242-screen-sharing-on-raspberry-pi-5-using-vnc-in-weston-and-wayland-with-the-yocto-project-and-openembedded/) - Leon Anavi
        * An interesting talk covering the practicalities of using VNC with modern software stacks - what was especially interesting was the difference between the very content-aware RDP and the pixel-based VNC
        * It's nice to see that VNC has come a long way since I used it on a Pi 2 back when those were all the rage[^2]
    * [Reproducible Builds: The First Ten Years](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3353-reproducible-builds-the-first-ten-years/) - Holger Levsen
        * A super interesting talk about the intricacies and challenges of reproducible builds and Holger's ambitions for them in the Debian project and beyond
        * It was a new topic to me and something I will take a look at again in the future, I hope
    * [Maintaining Go as a day job - a year later](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2000-maintaining-go-as-a-day-job-a-year-later/) - Filippo Valsorda
        * Entirely by coincidence, I ended up in this follow-up talk to [a blog post I had read about a year prior](https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer/)
        * TL;DR: Filippo's experiment seems to be going well, and it seems like he's stumbled across a promising new career choice, especially if it becomes more commonplace in the future
        * He's trying to make it more accessible to others by providing guidance and contract templates and the like in the future - so watch that space.
    * [Dependency injection: a different way to structure a project](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1868-dependency-injection-a-different-way-to-structure-a-project/) - Dylan Reimerink
        * A talk about using Uber's [Fx](https://go.uber.org/fx) library for dependency injection at the medium-large application scale
        * While not *really* having the use case for this, I'm very tempted to take it for a whirl in a project of mine in the future
    * [REST in Peace: using generics to remove REST boilerplate](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2568-rest-in-peace-using-generics-to-remove-rest-boilerplate/) - Tanguy Herrmann
        * I suspect we're going to see more and more this type of thing as generics age
        * A talk from Tanguy about using his experimental RIP library
    * [Easily Going Beyond MarkDown with Material for MkDocs](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1815-easily-going-beyond-markdown-with-material-for-mkdocs/) - Kenneth Hoste & Martin Donath
        * TL;DR: don't use MkDocs without Material
    * [Learning from disaster response teams to save the internet](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3553-learning-from-disaster-response-teams-to-save-the-internet/) - Hannah Aubry
        * A talk about how disaster response teams communicate and work effectively together to get their jobs done
        * The message here was that perhaps we should think of the people doing similar things to ourselves not as competitors but as allies that we should look to strengthen alongside ourselves, as that way lies good things
    * [Magic and Software](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2332-magic-and-software/) - Steve Goodwin/James Merlin
        * Discusses the nuances of magical intellectual property (whose trick is this? who gets to perform it? what even defines this trick?) as an interesting way to think about software IP
        * ... while performing a magic show
* **Day 2**
    * [You too could have made curl!](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1931-you-too-could-have-made-curl-/) - Daniel Stenberg
        * As it turns out, the secret to Curl's success is pretty much just persistence!
        * Plus Daniel shared some of the funny mistaken-identity emails he's received over the years because of the multitude of places his email address appears by virtue of it being included in his license text
    * [How to Build an Open Source School Cloud for 5 Million Users](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2415-how-to-build-an-open-source-school-cloud-for-5-million-users/) - David Walter
        * A talk from ownCloud's Chief Experience Officer about the high level detail of setting up ownCloud for use by an entire school's district - all using software that you can download and run yourself
    * [Solving community problems with documentation](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2136-solving-community-problems-with-documentation/) - Erin McKean
        * Did you know that [Google Season of Docs](https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs) is a thing?? I didn't
            * TL;DR: projects can apply for a grant to hire a technical writer to fix some documentation related issue, and then they write a case study on it
        * At the root of this talk was the fact that most of the time, better documentation can fix a variety of issues within a project's community[^3]
        * This also made me consider that a career as a technical writer might be a viable option
    * [Do you know YAML?](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2046-do-you-know-yaml-/) - Tina Müller
        * The Norway Problem and friends!
        * Discussed a variety of behaviours of YAML, the key differences between YAML 1.1 and 1.2 (and how only the former is properly, widely supported when ideally it would be both) and some of the tools that exist to work with YAML.
    * [So you think you know Git](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3611-so-you-think-you-know-git/) - Scott Chacon
        * I do wonder if Git might be the piece of software in the industry that has the highest communal lack of understanding considering it's widespread usage
        * An excellently interesting talk given by a really engaging and funny speaker
    * [Version control post-Git](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3423-version-control-post-git/) - Pierre-Étienne Meunier
        * Version control from first-principles using maths and category theory (among other things I didn't really understand) and it's unique perks
        * It also happened to completely erase the possibility of merge conflicts with some black magic, which is quite slick
    * [Switching the FOSDEM conference management system to pretalx](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3472-switching-the-fosdem-conference-management-system-to-pretalx/) - Johan Van de Wauw
        * The first of two interesting meta-talks from the FOSDEM staff team
        * Covered the slowly impending disaster that was the unmaintained and uninstallable Ruby-on-Rails codebase that is Pentabarf
        * 2024 was the first FOSDEM that used a new system, called Pretalx and with that came some new issues - but overall the migration was a success.
    * [FOSDEM infrastructure review](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3025-fosdem-infrastructure-review/) - Richard "RichiH" Hartmann, Sebastian Schubert
        * A fascinating talk about the logistics of running such a big conference while livestreaming all of it and providing internet to everyone at the same time
        * It revealed some interesting facts like how the main FOSDEM WiFi is IPv6 only and how the organisers really do not have much of an idea about how many people actually are at FOSDEM.
        * I also had no idea about the scale of the livestreaming operation - each room had a livestream, and each livestream was powered by a camera, three laptops (two in the room and one elsewhere), a camera, and a little custom 1U rack thing!

# Travelling Back

This is only really noteworthy because of the flight back - we were flying to London Heathrow from Brussels, and our flight had almost nobody on it. In the whole A320, there was about 20 people total; so few that I thought that the cabin crew were joking when they called "boarding complete" over the PA!

![Empty plane](emptyplane.jpg)

# But for now...

This was my first FOSDEM, and it was a hugely positive experience! It goes without saying that the conference was great, and the hotel I stayed at was nice and well connected, and the transport was easy and not overly expensive. All-in-all, I'd definitely do it again - and I'm looking forwards to doing it again next year!

---

[^1]: Here, in order to get a Firefox sticker, I had to prove my allegiance and show that I had Firefox installed on my phone - which I did with glee!
[^2]: The experience was quite bad, safe to say. Now, Leon reported that he was able to get about 20fps on a Pi 5, which is very nice to hear.
[^3]: Although it can, by proxy, then create new, unforseen issues!
[^4]: That's all the buses, trams and metro trains within the Brussels area.

