FOSDEM 2024 Schedule | Hacker News Reader

FOSDEM 2024 Schedule

fosdem.org

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Here are two FOSDEM guides, I found interesting when researching my trip.

https://petersouter.xyz/fosdem-survival-guide/

https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2015/09/07/my-guide-to-fosdem-eu...

It will be the first time at FOSDEM for me, so I cannot confirm or deny much, but I've definitely heard from multiple sources that it is very crowded. If want to attend a certain talk you absolutely have to arrive early.

I have not booked a hotel yet, so if you know a good place to stay, especially near the venue, pointers would be appreciated. My contacts are in my profile.

Finally a shoutout to the Rust crowd, links to the track and the Dev Room:

https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/rust/

https://rust-fosdem.github.io/

> I have not booked a hotel yet, so if you know a good place to stay, especially near the venue, pointers would be appreciated.

The venue (a university) is outside the center. It is has very good public transport connections so I always take a hotel in the center, preferably near a tram stop going directly to the university. The center is a better place for the evenings ;)

It's walkable from the CBD of Brussels if you don't mind a proper walk (about an hour).

It looks like the trams now accept contactless, which makes things easier.

Yep. Stay near city center (in the general vicinity of Place Royale) and longish walk/take transit. I don't know what hotels are around the university but you don't really want to stay there because it's a good ways from where you want to be in the evening.

There are many busses and trams going to the university, you can be as close as 20min away and be in a decent place that won't be as expensive as being next to the uni (there aren't that many hotels there anyway).

Having been there last year I can attest to that it's crowded however that's only a problem the first few talks of the day when motivation is still high. I've got a seat on the greater majority of the talks.

Only two regrets from last FOSDEM'22 were not having some large water bottle with me and not having cash on person. There's no (were no) ATMs nearby and not everyone takes cards.

There are ATMs about a 10-15min walk from the university in the "Cimetière d'Ixelles", I'm a bit surprised about people not taking cards, maybe not VISA? It's often possible to pay with a bank app or your phone as well though.

> If want to attend a certain talk you absolutely have to arrive early.

For popular tracks the trick used to be to arrive for an earlier less popular talk. Does not really work anymore, past 10 you'll probably never enter the PG or Rust tracks unless you spend more than 1 hour waiting outside.

Good news is streaming is really good so a fallback is to stay at the cafetaria and just stream. Lightning rooms usually have some space too :).

Edit: disclaimer my last Fosdem was in 2020 ^^

It's really comical not being able to fit into a devroom for a talk and noticing that people inside weren't actually paying attention but rather just holding a chair for another talk coming later...

Thankfully the hallway is then full of people interested in that subject!

Yeah :(; and streaming might have made it worse since you can now just stay in the same track all day and follow other talk.

You could try to force people to leave after each talk in popular tracks but it would probably take too much time and you would have people leaving early to go back to the queue ...

Last year I took headphones + power bank and watched presentations live on my phone while waiting in a queue at another auditorium or commuting. Worked well.

I have been to well-organized conferences that had the foresight to put popular sessions in larger auditoriums, and it largely eliminated lines and the unhappiness of not being able to get into a session that you wanted to attend.

I would say that FOSDEM is well-organized but they just can't create auditorium.

There is like probably at least 4 ultra-popular tracks and only one Janson ...

I haven't been for a while but there are basically too many people for the space. But it's a free conference and the space is what the space is. I basically don't stress getting into specific sessions or otherwise overly optimize sessions generally. I mean there's video after the fact if you really care.

There's another campus of the ULB and one of the VUB a 20min walk away so getting more auditoria isn't completely out of the question.

Is fossdem Kids friendly ? Is there somebody who came with a 8 year old child to fossdem ?

It's not kids unfriendly, but it is large and very very crowded. There's also a relative lack of facilities, like food is limited, you definitely can't drive there, queues for some of the toilets, so those things might be concerns. Would you take your kid to a large, slightly disorganized music festival? If yes then you should be alright.

Great, thanks. I think that should work :)

They seem to have kids track this year, never seen that before.

Haven't seen any kids so far.

I think it's doable but not a lot of fun. You will have to walk from one lecture to another outside, lots of crowding in plenty of spots.

Public transport is also full.

But there are two bigger rooms (one old one new) with good talks you can always go to

I have seen a couple of kids there who themselves were super interested in FOSS. Admittedly, I'm guessing they were at least 12 years old (I'm pretty bad at guessing ages), but definitely one of the highlights of my attending last year.

Fosdem sounds very bare bones and not appealing to visit.

You go there for the diversity of talks, all the open source spirit, great food and beer.

While it's definitely bare, and the weather was often shit, it's my most favorite conference

I've been to FOSDEM since around 2011. My advice to you is to not try to over optimize your schedule and the tracks you want to attend.

Overall the format of 1h makes for rather lightweight presentations, nothing really goes in depth, so watching the videos is good enough.

You should rather see it as a way to have social interactions with the maintainers of libraries you like, go to dev rooms, hangout in the cafeteria, have a good time with nerd friends, etc.

I agree and disagree.

In general, I find conference presentations are useful in a "This is interesting. I should dig into more." sort of way. I actually favor shorter presentations for the most part.

I agree more broadly. Trying to flit from room to room at FOSDEM is an exercise in frustration. I usually hang out in a devroom that has people/content I'm interested in, get together with people, etc.

So much is on video these days that there's less reason than ever to attend an event for breakout presentations.

Expect hotels to book up substantially in advance, roughly in order of increasing radius from the venue. Airbnb used to be a good fallback.

Public transport is fine but moderately confusing, Uber is likely to be oversubscribed. Hotel within walking distance (ymmv) is better.

Hostel Bruegel is affordable and full of FOSDEM crowd.

Oh, oh! I love FOSDEM. I live in Brussels and love the city, I want to make a couple of recommendations for people coming to visit:

1. DON'T RELY ON CARS. Traffic is awful here. Brussels is bikeable, has shared scooters and shared bikes as well as a fairly solid public transport infrastructure. 2. I recommend finding a hotel either in the city center, or near the Merode area (east of Parc du Cinquantenaire). Don't try to get a hotel near the ULB (the venue) itself... it's not the most exciting part of the city. 3. While you're here, take a moment to visit other cities in Belgium such as Mechelen, Leuven, or even Antwerp. They're a cheap and short train ride away (20 mins for Mechelen/Leuven, 40 for Antwerp).

Also if you have any questions feel free to ask them here I'll check back in a little while.

Ghent/Gent is also lovely and quite easily accessible!

Ghent and Bruges are both wonderful and vastly nicer to visit, IMO, than Brussels.

I understand this point from a tourist perspective but if you stay over for a longer time, you'll realize there's just that much more to do in cities like Brussels or Antwerp.

I don't doubt it, but the short term tourist perspective is what's relevant if we're talking about bookending a conference with some vacation.

Granted, I don't know if Bruges is quite as nice in February as in June.

That's true

Can you recommend some low budget district, with cheaper restaurants hostels ,etc.. I don't mind if it's 20 min more commute in the morning. I want to come with a group of students from Berlin and we have to do it on a shoestring budget

AirBnB should also show the cheaper options?

FOSDEM has a page with [practical info](https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/practical/accommodation/). I don't know the policy of the uni during the event but it might be useful contact the FOSDEM people and ask if it's possible to setup camp in the uni for the wk? There are a lot of empty rooms during the weekend after all and the students are on holiday at that time.

Look at hotels in Mechelen, it'll be a lot cheaper, cozier, and it's a 20min train ride away!

+1 to this. I'm from Leuven and would visit FOSDEM yearly - until I moved to Canada ~3 years ago. For tourists going to Belgium to attend FOSDEM, definitely stay a couple of days to explore what's around BE. It's a small country so relatively easy and cheap to travel around. :)

With any luck, I might be able to travel to Belgium around Feb and attend FOSDEM in-person this year.

Or cities in wallonia too. Like louvain-la-neuve or wavre.

Two Times in a row i got home from fosdem absolutely sick. It's always cold, rainy, the campus is an order of magnitude to small for the amount of people in attendance and the lecture rooms windows aren't opened long enough to deal with all the People Smells that accumulate. If you go there, were a Mask at all times and desinfect your hands frequently or you will end up sick.

Oh, and drinks are cheapest from the vending machines because they are from the university, not from the commercial vendors.

I was there 6 times and got sick 6 times after. The mask is a good idea. The weather was shitty every single time i was there.

There are some good talks, but i find it to be overcrowded and if you dont get a seat in the morning in a devroom and stay there the whole day then you spend your day wandering from one at-capacity devroom to the next.

The weather is not shitty, it is belgian. There's a difference :-)

I used to go sometimes when there were a number of adjacent conferences. I wouldn't fly over from the US for just FOSDEM. Yeah, it's sort of a crappy time of year in general for that area of Europe.

And, yeah, I latterly settled on a camp out in devroom strategy. It was much more pleasant than trying to move from full room to full room.

Agree it’s a terrible venue. Went once and wouldn’t go back. Brussels is one of my least favourite cities in Europe

I've gone a number of times when I've been in Europe for other events at around the same time. But I agree with you even it's maybe an unpopular opinion. It's always good to see people but Brussels is one of my least favorite European capitals, especially in February and the venue has a lot of problems to say nothing that there are probably 2 to 3x the number of attendees than it can comfortably handle.

I can't wait to be there, learn, and meet great people

This is my second year there, and here is our recipe at Quickwit:

- book an Airbnb for 1 week at Bruxelles, a spacious house is definitely better

- submit a few talks to share our feedback from the past year

- meet a LOT of people

- carefully choose a few talks to watch; the place is crowded, so you need to be in the room in advance

- organize an evening event with the fellows we appreciate a lot and who work in the same field

- enjoy teamwork during a few days in the big house

I hope to meet a lot of HN readers there; see you in 1 month or so!

We are organizing the Declarative and Minimalistic Languages Devroom on Sunday morning! We hope we see you all there!

What's up with that room only having three very widely spaced talks?

Talks appear in the public calendar after speakers confirm their attendance. So the way it works is that organizers plan the full day, emails are sent to all speakers and then the presentation slowly appear on the table, one by one, as confirmations trickle in.

I'm going to see all the talks in the Railways and Open Transport devroom.

https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/railways-and-open-tra...

Almost 500 different talks and not a single one which involves .NET or C#.

it has been not an easy thing to find .net developer since the last ice age.

Hi!

If you look in the sky, you'll see a bright spot. That's a meteorite. No matter what you do, you'll be extinct pretty soon :-)

Thankfully the meteorite will end all programming language wars.

Bah… I doubt that, but might depend on location.

Some people should really try to take an objective look at C# and .net and decide about its merit, separately from the company that developed it. I know the latter also plays a role in the decision to invest in technology, but most of modern .net is open source with MIT license.

The name of the conference may give you a subtle clue as to why that is...

.NET has been FOSS for quite some time now.

If anything, the .NET community should show up more on this kind of conferences.

Yeah, not showing up on conferences like this keeps the .NET stigma.

What stigma?

There are a great many companies and developers in the .NET orbit.

I agree there is still a certain bifurcation between the Microsoft and traditional FOSS worlds in terms of conferences etc. But I'm not sure either needs to convert the other.

The stigma that many UNIX circles still think .NET is Windows only, and will describe you .NET Framework as the current .NET.

Quite common in many circles that haven't kept up with .NET, nor are the kind of people to waste their lives in places like HN, Reddit, or spend evenings and weekends coding the next great app in Github.

Many of these people do hold management positions, and will favour non-M$ technologies for their company.

Yes I wrote M$ on purpose to stress the company culture.

As I understand it (having been for many years) FOSDEM is self-organizing, so if there is to be a dev room, someone from the relevant community needs to step up and do the work to organise one. It's not true that FOSDEM as a whole ignores .NET though, one year they even had Scott Hanselman doing his thing there.

Looks like .NET was represented in FOSDEM once, in 2019.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-and-typescript-at-...

It's popular among people who enjoy worse tooling and performance to put .NET in that weird box where "things I hate or don't understand about programming" belong as a scapegoat.

It's a stack they keep asking for and keep missing right under their nose. So the way FOSDEM presentations look like is not surprising. Sure, why do that when we can instead talk about Gleam which is a very good language if you really like how bitcoin mining was friendly to our ecology.

It's a bit early as the schedule is filling up, but far from complete or definitive. The Main Tracks for example aren't published yet, and many devrooms are still updating the schedule.

I quickly clicked through some of them and most ( if not all ) of the OS and Kernel are Linux only. Are there any thing that is BSD related?

There was a BSD devroom track in the past years, e.g. https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/track/bsd/

I don't see anything in this year's schedule either, and fosdem-bsd-devroom's recent tweets don't talk about it (I didn't scroll very long, there might be an announcement somewhere) https://twitter.com/fosdembsd

FOSDEM doesn’t want BSD anymore

I just relocated to Brussels and turns out I live 10-15 min by public transport from the venue !

I've been looking forward to attending for a couple years now, and now I definitely can't let this pass.

It would be my first time attending, does anyone want to join me ? I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I don't want to go alone hehe... Hit me up :) (my username @ protonmail.com)

I've been twice now, and as others have mentioned, the venue is bursting at the seams with the quantity of attendees. This, by itself, is manageable, except for the fact that the bathrooms tend to be in a truly dire state after a short while!

There are also some fringe events: https://fosdem.org/2024/fringe/

Speaking of fosdem, I fear that Covid has probably taken the satire writer n-gate from us :-( (add .com to read his short articles)

Also, I'm a full time linux user of 19 years before you flame me :-)

Oh no, that would explain the lack of updates :(

Was his identity revealed? He was in the audience for a talk I gave.

Last reply Oct 2021 unfortunately:

https://nitter.net/webshitweekly/status/1450563491069247489

Reply on news.ycombinator.com