2014-02-09
Thomas Martin
I attented FOSDEM for the first time this year with my friends @SwannFoo, @dbyzero and sawuit. Like I was briefed, it's a really big event : lot of developer rooms, lot of conferences, lot of geeks. I've done a tour of the numerous stands, including BSD, Roundcube (but they were gone !), Perl (they'd a tall and cool camel mascot, but you cannot take it as a goodie), Debian (out of t-shirt, very sad).
To conclude, I got a lot of stickers to decorate my laptop (but I've removed almost all of them before the end, I prefer to keep my laptop KISS, and I am not a fanatical user of all these projects).
About conferences, I particularly enjoyed Thierry Carrez's Why, Where, What and How to contribute to OpenStack. He talked about some incubated projects I didn't heard before (like Designate, a scalable DNS service, alternative to Amazon Route 53), and some tools used for contributing, like git review used to submit branches to OpenStack Gerrit. Despite it seems really tricky to have patches applied to OpenStack projects when you're not part of a big company, OpenStack encourages everyone to contribute, and that's a really good thing.
I regret I didn't have the opportunity to attend Docker conference, but the configuration management devroom was really crowded.
Finally, I attended Mailpile conference. Nice project, still in alpha. The developer who talked seemed really motivated, and they have to be to achieve their incredibly long TODO-list (encryption by default using GPG, ultra-fast search, Gmail-grade web interface, etc). It's a bit regrettable that they split their forces with Roundcube which is also a great project that I use, but the current codebase of Roundcube is maybe not a good starting point to achieve this huge roadmap.
Last words about the beer ! We've finished really late on Friday night, talking to Open Source contributors while drinking great local specialties. FOSDEM beer event took place in The Delirium just next the central place of Bruxelles. A place I recommend if you pass in this area. Some geeks maybe didn't drink enough, as we saw them ordering beer bottles at the FOSDEM cafeteria before 11 AM on Saturday :-)
Finally, note that the videos of most conferences should be available soon. Check the FOSDEM website.