FOSDEM 2021 | Hacker News Reader

FOSDEM 2021

fosdem.org

338 pointsDowwie110 comments

Even if not watching the talks (gotta admit, I'm a bit tired of watching streams of talks by now...), I find just browsing through the schedule and seeing what communities I'm not involved with are getting up to really interesting each year. Even if it's clearly just a subset of things it's a nice point to start search further.

Yeah, I have always found it interesting to read some fosdem slides, and catch a talk or two (with sped up playback) from the video archive.

I always meant to actually attend. Now I can, easily, online. So no excuses.

The last couple of years at least you could watch live streams during it, and recorded sessions after.

A lot of the fun is in the hallway conversations etc though, so would still recommend attending if you can at some point in the future

> A lot of the fun is in the hallway conversations etc though, so would still recommend attending if you can at some point in the future

I look forward to it; next year is plausible, now that we're manufacturing vaccines.

Or reading a certain snarky website's nutshells of the talks (and this site's).

TBH I'm not sure which particular snarky site you mean!

Interpreting your comment as sarcasm would be plausible given the subject, but anyway, your parent is probably talking about http://n-gate.com/fosdem/

I agree, in fact, until today I wasn't even aware about QAOps!

Only thing that's missing is the cold rain, the food trucks, the collectibles, and the strong ale.

haha I miss the people and the food :(

Me too. Shout out to the orga team who always provides cheap (but great!) sandwiches and mate. That's FOSDEM to me. That and the nerdy discussions in the rain while waiting in the food truck queue.

And not being able to watch a talk because you didn't bother to come 10 minutes earlier to reserve a spot or had to fly crossing the campus.

Yep :-) When I went last year I decided to just pretty much camp out in specific dev rooms and that worked a lot better. It had grown to a point where trying to flit from room to room was pretty much an exercise in frustration.

The people and the collectibles, definitively.

I like all of the things you've mentioned!

And getting sick on the last day on your way back to home.

I used to collect every single sticker I could find. I hope I can do that again next year. And the beer night in that alley.

Watch it from Portland?

The amount of free edge-of-industry information out there is staggering, can't wait till I get to browse the collection and pick and choose talks to watch.

You can find FOSDEM 2020 recordings on Youtube[0]. Despite my misgivings about Google, I certainly do use their product for this. Youtube is insanely good for teeing up technical talks to watch.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bagFAfFVruY&list=PL_QKjHDgmN...

I hope they don't see it to much as an industry event, but keep it focussed on the FOSS community. This is what makes the Charme of the event - you get all sorts of content, mostly about technology, less about tech marketing. Especially also from projects with little to no financial objectives.

Ah yes, I didn't mean to imply that the event was for industry -- I meant that it was at the cutting edge (which is normally the leading edge of industry) since it's full of hackers and builders.

I also do not want it to become an "industry event" in that sense, I enjoy it 10x more than I do the bajillion Kubecons. I was also referring to not just FOSDEM, but there's PostgresConf/Open, USENIX, OpenZFS, InfoQ, JSConf, Strange Loop -- there is so much information out there that it's exhausting but absolutely to our benefit.

As companies go through their possibly short-lived tryst with true open source (before everyone starts reverting to shareware), they are sharing big ambitious projects that they're working on, and giving interesting talks on the architecture, motivations, etc.

I'd like to add TinyML Summit to that list.

TinyML Asia 2020 was wonderfully executed virtually. The amount of truly breakthrough research and development offered is astounding! It is also quite possible to make connections and discuss people's work and ideas post fact much more easily nowadays. I must say the Q&A feature works quite well in a videoconference setting. Everyone can see the questions - there is no chance of them being misheard.

For smaller settings a live (virtual) discussion is also remarkably workable and useful. Never thought I could easily chitchat with one of the authors of the Agile manifesto, or of the head of the largest LoRaWAN network in the world, etc...

Excited for TinyML Summit 2021!!

Serving the FOSS developer community is FOSDEM's goal. We live by its grace.

That is more than just fluffy talk. I believe FOSDEM to currently be fairly well positioned to keep that focus:

- I like to hope/think FOSDEM's financial situation is close to an optimum: healthy enough to guarantee our editorial independence, but not interesting enough to attract vultures sophisticated enough to distract us from our goal.

- Our formal structure should shield us from takeover attempts fairly well.

- I have every reason trust my fellow board members. We are individuals with alternatives. We actively choose to convert part of our energy into volunteering for FOSDEM instead of into money in our bank accounts.

- We have a physical allergy to tech marketing rear end talk.

- Each of us can tap into an incredibly talented and powerful pool of community allies.

- We actually try to look at opportunities and pitfalls now and then. That probably distiguishes us from >95% of all organisations.

All of the videos are also available for download:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/events/

YouTube is so good that I frequently forget it's a Google product. It's a feather in their cap that they've let it remain mostly separate (minus that brief dalliance with Google+ integration).

Most of the discussions will take place using Matrix. This blog article explains more on the topic:

https://matrix.org/blog/2021/01/04/taking-fosdem-online-via-...

And they even have talks on how to run a big virtual conference and some lessons learned :

  * https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/matrix_communities/
  * https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/jitsi_scaling/
  * https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/vircadia/

Ooo! William Byrd on miniKanren!

"miniKanren: a minimal declarative language for relational programming"

https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/minimalkanren/

OpenPOWER - It will be interesting to see update on MicroWatt, the Free, Open Source implementation of POWER.

PostgreSQL- Lots of Update.

Containers - Running Linux container on Darwin / macOS.

I find it funny, that The most interesting section for me is actually RetroComputing! Ada, Germini, DOS, 68K Mac, ZX Spectrum.

As far as I remember, it's a first time there are separate devrooms for Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It's been 10 years now, is it me or it feels like a waste of efforts ?

OpenOffice is a waste of efforts, sure. It's not really a problem though as there are barely any efforts at all.

That's ridiculous, my wife makes great money using OpenOffice to create and publish digital downloads for teachers.

Here is her e-commerce shop: https://shop.printableprompts.com

If you are in the market to sell digital downloads check the platform I'm building: https://www.makepostsell.com

Open source has lots of efforts and bringong more attention to Open Office (or Libre office) is a great idea.

>That's ridiculous, my wife makes great money using OpenOffice to create and publish digital downloads for teachers.

What parent means is OpenOffice is barely maintained (or no effort is put), not that it's worthless.

They also imply that LibreOffice is where the action is, and is better maintained with a bigger community.

I don't follow the projects to know if that's the case, but that's what the parent seems to mean, not that OpenOffice is not usable.

Thanks for clarifying.

Umm, what kind of resolution is the calendar meant to be displayed at?

https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/day/saturday/

Fosdem is a really great event. No corporate (or too much) involvement. A true volunteer run conference with great talks, great people and great Belgian Beer :-)

Bit of a shame there's no Rust dev room.

Rust talks always happened in the Mozilla dev room historically.

Getting people to stop talking about Rust is the big challenge. No need to facilitate it.

A rust room was actually the first thing I was looking for. But I can understand that not everyone shares our enthusiasm, because there are also a lot of other cool things to talk about.

I was also looking for that.

Go, Kotlin, Zig, Python, JavaScript have devrooms.

It seems there is one Rust talk in the Mozilla room. But this is way less than for the other languages.

I wonder why Rust is somewhat underrepresented at FOSDEM. Or maybe my view is totally biased from reading too much HN...

Despite, now that Mozilla does not maintain Rust anymore, I think this really should get a separate devroom.

Edit: Downvote? Why? What is controversial about what I said? Really curious. That Rust should get a separate devroom? Not relevant enough? But this is even what I considered in the sentence before.

Or are there more Rust talks and I didn't found them? Actually, there seem to be some more, but still less than for other languages: https://fosdem.org/2021/search/?q=rust

Rust had a room the last few years. I don’t know if anyone actually applied for one this year. It’s a weird time for conferences.

In normal times, giving a talk at a conference is a good excuse to go to a conference you want to attend--and many orgs won't generally let folks attend an event if they're not doing something specific there. In the current circumstances, a lot of people are a lot less inclined to put the effort to create one more video among the doubtless thousands of videos being created for conferences. I know I'm still doing some but definitely doing fewer submittals than I would normally.

Rust had a dedicated dev room last year: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/track/rust/

Rooms are organized by volunteers of the communities. Typically there was a shortage of physical rooms which doesn't exist that much inna virtual event (still they wouldn't take everything I assume and haven't counted if/how much they grew)

If the is no Rust room, it seems that nobody from the Rust community saw need to hold these kinds of gatherings. So maybe an item for your to-do list to push for next year. (And as others have said in this thread: previously it was part of Mozilla and given Mozilla's change of priorities recently, I assume they stepped back)

The organizers of the previous RUST devroom (2018, 2019, 2020) decided that we won't be organizing it this year as a huge part of FOSDEM is getting people in the same room and being able to create face to face discussions on the back of the

We announced it here a while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/j03i80/fosdem_2021_on...

We were encouraging others to fill the gap if they wanted but no one really stepped up so... ;) I hope that next year we'll be back in person.

Looking forward to watching this one

https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/gotailscale/

Join #fosdem-orval for a beer!

Excited to see plenty of WebRTC talks in there. 2020 was a huge boost for WebRTC but I think 2021 will be the year for lots of innovation around it now that the tooling has started to mature and the browser vendors are actively on it.

Based on the blog post linked here in the comments, the talk themselves are actually already prerecorded. The live aspect will only be the Q/A with the speaker and a host.

Does that change how people will perceive the conference?

IMHO that's generally a good model: it reduces issues with the setup or speakers internet connections, and allows the speaker to stress-free answer questions in chat during the talk.

It can make sense to have a real-time portion so that attendees get more of a sense of attending a live "event." But I agree that my experience as someone helping to run some events is that it makes sense to pre-record most sessions. There's a lot less sense of working without a safety net, fewer problems, and more time to focus on making those parts that are live go as smoothly as possible.

Not a lot. At FOSDEM (at least for the last 10y, I have been attending), you have four kinds of talks:

* Lighting talks/short talks: Most of the time, you may not have Q/A if the speaker talks too long but you can catch they off stage to talk about it. So you keep the live aspect.

* Big/Popular talks/Main roam (Janson): You don't ask Q/A during those presentations so it would not change a lot.

* Mid-sized talks/roams: It depends on the speaker how much interaction, he wants.

* Tiny roams: There you will loose the jokes and the fun going on with well-know speakers in their communities.

I think we will see less informal/fun talks because the streaming format does not easily allow the spur of the moment joke/question. The quality of the speaker will really during those Q/A moments but on a time management side, the good news is that you have less time-keeping to do with a prerecorded streaming event if each talks has his channel.

Of course and it will not be the same;

For the ccc conference rc3, linus said something in direction of 'lets not do that again'.

At least for me, i go to Fosdem for all the talks of course but also to see people, dring belgien beer, eat, freeze, have wet shoes and enjoy the sun on the second day for 1-2 hours.

There's enough talks in here to last me most of 2021

I don't know what is with all the negativity here in the toplevel comments. I've downloaded the Android app and bookmarked quite a few talks that I'm looking forward to.

Tons of stuff there. Any favorites?

Looking forward to https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/retro_gemini/

Same here. Also https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/matrix_pinecones/

Seems to be hard to create a website where you can login or maintain a session with Gemini. Perhaps it's too radical? Can't indicate your preferred languages either.

Perhaps a "simple web mode" would be the better solution... a proxy that strips away the unwanted parts.

> Seems to be hard to create a website where you can login or maintain a session with Gemini

I don't think that's supported. Gemini is more about providing an ultra-lightweight alternative to 'Web 1.0'. It's more at the level of the man page format, [0] or markdown, than HTML.

I imagine they might want a way to provide access-control, but I doubt they'd be interested in implementing read/write features.

> Can't indicate your preferred languages either.

Looking at the spec, I think you can. [1]

> Perhaps a "simple web mode" would be the better solution... a proxy that strips away the unwanted parts.

Don't we have that with Reader Mode and Outline.com?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page#Formatting

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html

I'm looking forward to the open source CAD talks. There is one about the Linkstage3 branch of FreeCAD that will go over some of the new features added there and those improvements will eventually end up in the mainline branch.

How do the video recordings happen? It still looks like this important feature was forgotten in Jitsi?

I didn't submit any talks this year but I assume it's like other events where people record them at home and then upload them somewhere. ADDED: A lot of people use OBS.

Jitsi does have recordings :-)

In that entire page, it does not once tell me what FOSDEM is (at least on mobile). I can infer it's some sort of computing conference from the events, but that's about it.

Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting

Did you click "about"? https://fosdem.org/2021/about/

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