This year I made it, It was my first time at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting. I was amazed about the crowd of people and the amount of talks. It was simply impossible to visit all interesting lectures, because lots of them has been held in parallel.
It was also a pleasure to meet again all those people I know from the open source communities. The Friday beer event was very nice, as well as chatting with people between and after the lectures.
From my pint of view, the most important talks have been the inside views to oVirt and the presentations about the Deltacloud project. It was also important to get more informations about Aeolus . Most of the for me important talks are bound to cloud and/or virtualization projects. This is because I’ll hit those project sooner or later on my job as Linux consultant.
Lessons learned
I’ll try to get to Fosdem 2013 if time allows. But next time I’ll be better prepared for the inconveniences of the venue.
- If the weather will be the same as this year, three layers of clothes are not enough, in some auditoriums the temperatures have been close to the freezing point.
- If it is heavily snowing, touch screens of smart phones are going berserk, navigation not possible, taking a old style navigation device with me as well a paper city-map
- If you wait for the bus, you need to wave hands if the bus approaches or it will simply pass you and letting you wait for another 20 min at -15°C
- Having a hotel near “Gare Central” is a big plus, it is near the Delirium Cafe where the Friday beer event happens as well as on the route of Bus Nr. 71 to ULB
- SMS messages in Belgium obviously have usually a delay of a few hours and are not reliable, calling friends costs much more but does the job
- Mobile internet access is not always reliable in Belgium, since I dont know the city very well, I’ll take a off-line navigation Phone with me (my old Nokia E72)
A huge thank you
I would like to thank all the volunteers who organized the event and made it an unforgettable event, as well as the countless speakers sharing their knowledge with the world
Upcoming events
The next upcoming interesting events in Europe:
- Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2012 March 17th and 18th
- LinuxTag 2012 in Berlin (my new home town) May 23th to May 26th.
If I missed an event to mention here, let me know.
Have fun!