FOSDEM 2018 schedule | Hacker News Reader

FOSDEM 2018 schedule

fosdem.org

147 pointssimon_acca29 comments

This is the first year with a combined CAD and open hardware dev-room organized by the folks from CERN.

https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/cad_and_open_hardware...

I'm thoroughly looking forward to the KiCad talks.

Those and also the other free electronics CAD talks - there's two newcomers at least that have some exciting ideas.

It seems that language rooms are less popular: Guile, Python, Ruby, Lua rooms are not present compared to last year. Nevertheless there are bunch of talks that seem interesting to me:

  - Automating Your Lights with Open Source
  - Using Cryptographic Hardware
  - Smart Cards in Linux and why you should care
  - Inside Monero

I will probably be there for both days.

In my experience (I've been to FOSDEM 3 times) the language rooms were the most difficult ones to get into as they were full 90% of the time.

It also looks like Python has a main track on Saturday.

They decided to skip a year for some rooms to allow other interesting topics to have a room.

https://twitter.com/fosdem/status/915543798763139074

There is a Perl language room with several interesting sounding presentations.

Go and java are still quite present. I am also going to some python talks. :-)

This is going to be the first year that Nim[1] received a stand at FOSDEM[2]. I'm super thankful to FOSDEM for accepting our request and can't wait to chat to all the attendees.

Myself and the rest of the core Nim team will be there, so do swing by if you've got some free time in between the brilliant talks.

1 - https://nim-lang.org

2 - https://fosdem.org/2018/stands/

For the people going to FOSDEM, there are many volunteering tasks available at: https://volunteers.fosdem.org/tasks/

Open source software and hardware talks this year too: https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/space/

FOSDEM is one of the most community-oriented conferences I attend, which is quite an achievement considering its size nowadays.

A couple of us from the Prosody XMPP server project will be there in the "realtime lounge" area. Feel free to come and say hi!

Fosdem is great, I’ve been there many times. If you have the chance you should definitely go. What I like is that is it very low-key/accessible. Over the years I ‘met’ / talked with RMS, Robert Love, Tim O’Reilly, Wietse Venema, Timo Sirainen and Larry Wall by just walking around on campus and bumping into them.

I have also been there a couple of times, but the last time it felt a bit strange seeing so many people carrying around Apple devices on what is supposed to be a FOSS conference.

A lot of FreeBSD development is done on Apple devices these days.

Might be, but the ones I noticed were happily using OS X, iPhones or iPads.

I use quite a few comercial software and spend most of my time on Windows, so maybe I don't have any right to say anything.

It just felt strange seeing some people advocating a FOSS world, while their devices weren't in sync with that message.

I was referring to Apple devices running OSX. Guess I should have made that a bit more clear.

I'm excited to go to FOSDEM for the first time this year. I plan to be hanging around Open hardware and Internet of things rooms.

> FOSDEM is free to attend. There is no registration. Just turn up!

I was quite surprised to see that. Even free to attend conferences usually require registration so that they can plan ahead and prevent overcrowding. Did FOSDEM not have this kind of problems in the past? Judging by the number of people I know that regularly attend it, it's quite a well known event.

Some rooms fill up really fast, when the room is full they start denying access to the room, for obvious security reasons.

If there is a talk that you don't want to miss, arrive before the previous talk ends, this way you'll be able to enter as soon as the previous talk ends. On really popular rooms it has happened to me in the past that no one got out and I was not able to attend the talk. Since (almost) all sessions are recorded and made available soon after FOSDEM ends, I watched it at home later.

*safety

> so that they can plan ahead and prevent overcrowding

They don’t do anything to prevent overcrowding, and so it is indeed painfully overcrowded and you may not be able to get in to see any talks you planned to. You basically have to pick one room, get there early, and then just camp out all day.

Not my experience at all over several years now.

Some things are busy, but there's usually plenty of others that are interesting or the chance to take a break and/or a beer and chill a bit.

Each talk can be overcrowded but the venue is very large and there are more parallel talks going on than at any other conference that I know, so it's the nature of the beast that people will not distribute themselves perfectly equally for each of the maximum of 33 different ongoing talks at the same time.

Each room is also not equal of size. The key note room is massive so there is always a seat there, but some is just sized for 30-40 people. When a famous project is talking in such a room it will fill up extremely fast, or in the worst case, be already filled up from the previous talk and people will just stay in their seats.

The common solution that other conferences do with this problem is giving out tickets to each talk and have people register exactly what they are going to see, but that in turn carries a equally massive issue in that there will always be empty seats from people simply not showing up. This in turn can lead to organizations trying to overbook in order to "fill the empty seats", turning into arguments and fighting when the calculated probability of an empty seat shows to be incorrect in reality.

I have been at FOSDEM for several years now and I never felt it to be overcrowded. Some talks will have a poorly chosen room (often based on topic genre than expected audience attendance), so a room designated for the IT security track can have 18 talks where the average number of listeners is 25 but then during a single session the Tor project has a talk in that track with an attractive title, and 100+ people are suddenly hoping to get into a room which is intended for 30.

I meant things like the food queues as well - they can get crazily long - and even corridors can feel dangerously overcrowded to me the few years I’ve been there. Then when it rains it also gets super humid from all the wet coats and bags everyone carries. It’s a valuable conference definitely and I appreciate the effort that goes into it but I don’t find it very pleasent. It’s a bit more like a festival than a conventional conference.

For those interested in Linux-based Virtualization (includes Xen, KVM, QEMU) and IaaS topics:

https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/virtualization_and_ia...

Sorry for an off-topic question, but does anyone know where to park a car not far from the university overnight? It's our first year at FOSDEM, and we would like to avoid driving to the center of the city only to leave the car there. Thank you.

Looking forward to the AV1 update.

On which track will the AV1 update be?

Open Media track

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