My Experience at FOSDEM 2023

Hi 👋 welcome to a new post.

Today I just want to share some comments about my trip to FOSDEM 2023. This blog is starting to look like a travel blog for meetups and conferences 😅… I promise I’ll post some programming (practical and not) content soon.

As I already said in my 2022 review, one of my goals for 2023 is to attend more conferences and participate more in communities. I must say, I started the year in the right way 🤩.

I decided to go to FOSDEM in December while talking to some people at the XPUG meetup. After hearing what the event was about, I immediately grabbed a friend and bought the plane tickets to go there!

What is FOSDEM? It’s a free event where developers meet to share ideas and collaborate on open-source software. The event is held every year at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and is sponsored by the main open-source projects and companies.

FOSS stands for “Free and Open Source Software”: free as in both “free beer” and “free speech”. For software to be FOSS, it should give:

• Freedom to run it
• Freedom to access his source code, study it and change it to fit our own necessities
• Freedom to share/spread the software (original or modified) to help others

Working and using open source software means collaborating with other developers, sharing our programming and product ideas, and together improving the world. And that’s exactly the spirit I saw at FOSDEM!

Community and Inspiration

I think that being part of a community is great. It gives me a chance to see developers like me, but also completely diverse people.

While at FOSDEM, I experienced this sense of community and diversity firsthand. It felt like being in a sort of “tribe” of nerds/developers gathering for what they love.

The halls of Brussels university were full for both days of the conference. The city itself was conquered by nerds for the entire weekend! During the conference everyone was chatting about their latest projects and ideas.

Also, many open source projects and companies I know (think of the major Linux distros and software companies) were there with their stands, gadgets (Debian was giving away beer!) and stickers!

Being there reminded me of my days at university (not so long ago), hacking silly stuff on my laptop. But in this case, the people speaking and attending the conference were anything but amateurs like me 😅. Open Source can be a way to express ourselves, to find inspiration and to be part of something bigger, and FOSDEM showed me the way many people are doing it.

List of Talks I attended

Below you can find the list of talks I personally attended while there. I didn’t attend all the events I wanted (some rooms were full all the time!) and ended up going around the different rooms in search of inspiration.

If you have the time, give them a look!

Saturday

• The State of Go
• Recipes for reducing cognitive load (in go)
• Developing Bluetooth Mesh Networks with Rust
• 5 errors when building embedded systems
• Making Continuous Delivery Accessible to All
• How to automate documentation workflow for developers
• Our Mad Journey of Building a Vector Database in Go
• Building a basic event-driven application in go in 20 minutes
• Is Go object-oriented? A case of public opinion

Sunday

• Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)
• Zero-Knowledge Cryptography and anonymous engineering
• How to build an event-driven application in python
• Fear the Mutants, love the Mutants
• Having something to hide
• Rust in the Kernel (via eBPF)
• The 7 key ingredients of a great SBOM
• I made a GameBoy emulator to learn about computers. And now I work with them…