FOSDEM 2024: my experience, some notes and tech tips
ounapuu.ee
ounapuu.ee
Whilst last year was spent mainly on coffee, drinks and food with friends this year I basically spent the entire weekend with my son in the kids workshop. He loved it and I really enjoyed seeing him interested in coding.
Also spoke to lots of very nice and very diverse people; that whole "strike up a conversation with strangers" thing is what I love about FOSDEM and it's why we'll be back again next year. Everyone is welcome, most of us aren't there to flog something but to have nice chats and maybe catch a session or two.
Thanks to all of the organisers!
Maybe we should have a #hn community place or meet there next year? :-)
* Microblocks: https://microblocks.fun/
* MIT App Inventor: https://appinventor.mit.edu/
* Hedy: https://www.hedycode.com/
Hedy in particular was extremely good: it teaches kids to code in text in Python, building up from what looks like natural text into real code. The session was given by a primary school teacher (who was Dutch, which helped as my lad is Dutch/British and that's his first language).
She had excellent results with dyslexic kids, it turns out the black/white nature of code combined with the detail really helps them. Materially improves spelling.
Age? My son is 10 but there were younger kids there. My daughter is 7 and my son taught her how to use Scratch when he got home. So she's old enough. Although she is bright (skipped a year at school and the work she is doing is two years ahead of that).
- Yes the trash situation is bad. It is actually due to political infighting. As you may know Brussels has 19 communes, 19 mayors, a whole lot of pencil pushers and 4 differently colored trash bags that each have their own pickup day, so this leads to some ridiculous situations.
- There's much better bars or introductions to beer than Delirium, which is basically for tourists (as are those meters of beer on a plank). There's Moeder Lambik in 2 locations, a whole bunch of bars around Place Flagey and about another dozen at the Parvis of St Gilles.
- Public transport tends to suck unless you're lucky with the stops / lines and the rental bikes / scooters are the best way to get around. That, or walking. It's a pretty small city.
- The city is safe, just be careful around the Gare du Midi esp at night, and pick pockets exist almost everywhere. Don't lose sight of your valuables.
- Belgians are discreet and modest, almost too much. Any lack of enthusiasm and fireworks is for this reason :)
- Winter is drab around here. Humid, gray, cold.
And though I've taken the bus from near the Place Royale to the university for FOSDEM, it's very walkable.
This is counter to their stated preference, but the actions end up revealing themselves.
Reminds me of Temple Bar in Dublin. Anyone from Dublin will always advise you to avoid the place as it is full of overpriced tourist traps, but tourists consistently go there and any I've spoken to always report having a great time. Leave them to it I guess!
[1] https://www.ceastudyabroad.com/blog/content-creator/2017/12/...
[1] there used to be an official FOSDEM beer event there before COVID, but people just still go there.
I found public transport in Brussels pretty decent. Especially the MOBIB card system just works. This is completely different where I live in Germany.
I only had difficulties on the day of my arrival on Thursday because of the farmers protests and that is where an E-Scooter saved me. That you can just pick up a scooter even when you signed up in a different country is fantastic.
Apart from that, I have the hunch that Germany is the only remaining country where people pay cash. That you can pay everything with your card is quite convenient.
Maybe it only happened because I looked strongly tourist. Thieves and pickpockets are more quick and sly in London. Frankly, every visit I have always felt a bit unsafe in Brussels. Someone I met at FOSDEM last year had their car window smashed in.
>Public transport tends to suck
Yes, it's clear you have never lived in another city in Belgium ;) The public transportation is by far the best in the country and thrash pick up days couldn't be easier. It's always the same day of the week, every week of the year. It's just that people suck at it in Brussels.
Coming from the UK, the city trash and cycling standards seem fine :) There is a darned hill in the way of everything in Brussels, but I brought my bike helmet and buzzed around on hire scooters.
I agree with another poster here, the ventilation in some rooms will just be intolerable for some people. Sometimes windows are opened and you can sit near them, sometimes not. Quite often you will have walked across campus and squeezed onto the floor at the back of a busy room to sweat, straining to hear someone mumble.
The atmosphere around the grubby 60s uni & grey weather is non-existent. But the live streaming is apparently excellent. You don't need to travel to see the talks, and it's easier to quit out of a bad one :)
It's a logistical marvel in some ways, but also a total white boys club, the most homogeneous conference I've ever been to.
Is it? It's one of the most trans-inclusive conferences I've been to. There's a lot more women at recent editions as well. I suspect the audience was a reasonably fair representation of the IT crowd in Belgium and surrounding countries. There's something to be said for the lack of diversity in IT in Belgium, but you can't really blame FOSDEM for that.
It's by far the most diverse conference I've been to.. but I've only been the Microsoft events and CES where the most diverse you got was being a white CIS dude wearing jeans instead of a suit.
It gets better on repeat visits. The first one is daunting, it's a very busy conference with lots of running around and often not making it into a full room.
Once you figure out what's where and the general flow of the place it's a much smoother experience.
My current strategy is to mostly ignore the big keynotes. You can always watch the video afterwards. To me the most important things are the talks where I expect to have questions to ask, and the stands. If you can't ask a question after the talk you can often still talk to the speaker in the hallway.
With a bit of practice and a plan you can have very cool conversations with some very interesting people, and sometimes people organize an after-FOSDEM dinner or similar type event.
Sorry you feel that way.
Personally, diversity of people's thought interests me more than diversity of their superficial birth characteristics.
I recall meeting great people and talking about all manner of things when I last attended FOSDEM.
Maybe next time try interacting more - learning about people's character and experience - rather than judging those people on their skin colour at first glance?
What is dishonest is that both you and the person I replied to are pretending that anti-racism is racism and racism is anti-racism
EDIT just checked your history and its full of right wing provocateur comments, not a surprise…
* only white people can be racist.
* all black people are victims of racism.
* skin colour diversity in industry, and racial wealth distribution, needs to be achieved coercisively, as opposed to meritocratically
Please google "the soft bigotry of low expectations" to get an understanding of why your ideology is harmful, not just to the white people you are directly bigoted towards, but also the black people you think you're helping.
The Overton Window shifted sufficiently far to the left that perpetrators of anti-white and anti-male bigotry can't even comprehend why some would find it disagreeable.
I think we need to take a long hard look at the education system, legacy media and social media, and tackle hyper-"progressive" ideology where necessary. Society is going to a dark place if we allow the next generation to be endoctrinated with moral relativism.
You'd call out the racism in my (hypothetical) statement, right? At least, I hope you would.
The criticism of Brussels is warranted. There is a serious lack of public toilets in Belgium in general, but it's worse in Brussels due to the population density and prevalence of poverty. The trash situation is something I've been meaning to write an essay on, but two words to sum it up: political incompetence.
Scheduling is uneven. Talk A ends at 10:50, talk B starts at 10:45. Also getting from the H building to K takes a good while, and interesting talks tend to get full which is an extra reason to try to be early.
Unfortunately it's not a really solvable problem short of maybe making the conference a day longer.
Did a quick search because I recall an old article by The Economist dating to between 2000-2005 already complaining of people in suites leaving their dogs to shit on the sidewalks without concern. I sadly can't find it but there is plenty of content that teils me things haven't changed.
To be fair this happens at KubeCon too.
It is generally understood.
Who ever thought that while reading the first post on the site and not yet done, I'd actually appreciate being scrolled back to the top, and getting a popup asking to subscribe to a newsletter?
Even if I wanted to, I'd refuse out of principle.
Thanks for pointing it out.
I poked around and it doesn't appear I can disable that popup without disabling the whole newsletter feature. I don't care so much about people subscribing but my less techy friends seem to like the newsletter mode.
I messaged the hashnode.com support to ask about this. Other than that I've been pretty happy with them given that I don't want to selfhost my blog right now.
Anyway, thanks for letting me know.
FOSDEM is not a place to hack on new ideas with people or to learn by watching talks. That's best left for the streams.
Overall the main benefit is networking and beer.
Of course the people were great. Lots of nice conversations to be had. This is why I'll probably return for the next one.
A lot of the fun I had happened during Byte Night, where, during a break from partying, I stumbled upon a buch of people doing a Typescript CTF, which evolved into quite a few nice conversations.
I was pretty tired on day 2.
FOSDEM doesn't fit in its venue anymore, which is great in a way. It's been incredibly successful, but now it's time to find a bigger venue.
Personally, it's quite a bit less tempting to attend than it was when there were a number of more-or-less time adjacent European events I had some interest in.
The ULB campus is pretty big, finding a bigger venue is going to be complicated.
The conference itself is free (as in Beer).
The talks are online, but FOSDEM is full of interesting people. Some of those people aren't very available online. Some you don't even know they exist. Some organize an after-FOSDEM dinner like the Perl people do. You can ask around questions like "Is anyone from X here?" and probably get a positive answer even if they don't have anything in the schedule.
FOSDEM also has BOF (Birds of a Feather, basically a bunch of people in a room having a chat about something) that can be set up on an improvised manner. And of course you can just agree to eat or drink something with them.
So it can be extremely useful to attend in person especially if you come with a plan.
I've gone to dinner with people, had a KDE member help debug stuff on my laptop, and done experimentation on Open Source VR with another project's members, for instance.
That can be extremely useful, and for the price of travel and hotel (FOSDEM itself is free), that's an extremely good deal.
I was surprised how big the conference is, and how diverse the attendees were, and it was great to meet and talk to maintainers of many pervasive open-source projects.
It was also nice to hear so many people tell us they've already moved to OpenTofu :)
I attended for the first (and only so far) time back in 2020, right before COVID, and took some notes as well (https://jmmv.dev/2020/02/fosdem-navigation-101.html). A lot of the advice I wrote matches what the author shares here, so I'd say the article resonated with me :)
Definitely a fun place to attend. If you do open source once in a while, it's invigorating to visit!
Politicians also invented orange bags, full of smelly compost. Hopefully FOSDEM is not organized in August.
The HSBXL party was the last one (la "der des der"), they gonna destroy the building. They ran out of beers at midnight, organizors had to rush to the nearby pakistanis shop to buy the stock of beers :-)
Really great atmosphere.
Seems like boozing takes precedence over all else at this event.
Edit for the unaware: https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/germany-entered-a-recession-l...
I could choose to spend my remaining years wearing a mask, or choose to accept the risk. Those are the options. I choose the latter.
But most people don't even know that N95s offer excellent personal protection, and most people are surprised when they see how long the list of interconnected risks is.
COVID-19 and Immune Dysregulation https://whn.global/scientific/covid19-immune-dysregulation/
COVID Effects on the Brain https://whn.global/scientific/covid-effects-on-the-brain-a-s...
Sadly, capital doesn't want people informed because that's bad for our archaic consumption-first economy, so capitalist media reports accordingly.
Exactly. So if you want to, wear one, don't insist that others do.
The choice to put others at risk shouldn't be yours.
It the same problem with airports. Every person who is there with cold symptoms have decided that traveling that day is worth more than the risk of spreading illness to others.
The big innovation during the covid pandemic was not masks, it was the cultural shift of people staying inside when they had cold symptoms. Sadly we are now returning back where it is totally fine to again have cold symptoms in public. That is the choice that shouldn't be theirs to make.
At this point, imposing a mask mandate would likely exclude many more people than it would include. To my knowledge, no tech events have banned masks, so anyone who wants or needs to avoid this risk has the option by wearing a well-fitted mask or respirator. Insisting that everyone else does is ridiculous.