Introduction

When I was still working as a scientist I regularly attended conferences. By attending conferences, I always learned an incredible amount in a short time. Science thrives on discourse. Open exchange with colleagues and feedback from experts helped me to advance my research. In addition, conferences are a great way to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in your field. They provide an opportunity to meet other researchers in your field and make professional connections. Attending conferences can help to advance your career by increasing your visibility and credibility in your field. Finally, I found conferences to be an inspiration for my own research.
Now that I work in the IT industry, I still see the same benefits in attending conferences or community events. Every time I get to know exciting new projects, get valuable sources that are worth pursuing further or learn from the best practice session. Hence, I try to keep attending one to two conferences a year. The last few years have been difficult due to the pandemic, with many conferences canceled or only held virtually.
Therefore, this year I was happy to see that the FOSDEM conference was back as an in-person event after a two-year break. This year the conference took place on February 4th and 5th in Brussels.
FOSDEM - Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting - is a non-profit, community-driven event that brings together thousands of open-source enthusiasts from around the world. The conference takes place annually in Brussels at the Free University of Brussels (Université libre de Bruxelles - ULB) and is considered to be one of the largest annual gatherings of open-source developers in Europe.

Sponsors

The funding concept of the conference is also interesting and perhaps a bit unusual. The conference is organized by volunteers and free for visitors to attend. Funding is mainly provided by sponsors, T-shirt sales, and voluntary donations. This year 500 hoodies and 2500 t-shirts were sold, making the swag completely sold out.

Visiting FOSDEM

In total, there were 744 talks in 32 main tracks and 34 devrooms at this year’s FOSDEM, according to the closing presentation. The great variety of talks was very impressive. There were devrooms on general topics such as e.g. containers, and continuous integration or on specific programming languages or projects such as Matrix, Python, Go. Javascript.
In addition to the presentations, there was also the opportunity to talk to the developers of individual projects at their stands. I took the opportunity to discuss a specific configuration question of my home server at the Matrix booth. This exchange with the developer helped me a lot.
The conference attracted a lot of participants, which occasionally led to waiting times e.g. at the food trucks. Often the opportunity was used to quickly get into conversation and talk about what motivated one to participate in the conference. In general, I had the impression that the participants treated each other very respectfully.

Summary

I was very impressed with the conference. Especially the variety of topics and the quality of most of the presentations I saw were outstanding. I can only recommend attending FOSDEM and I will try to attend FOSDEM next year as well. The next weeks will be marked by trying out various projects and tools. Fortunately, the conference is gradually releasing video recordings of the talks, also many of the presentation slides are available on the conference website.

References

• FOSDEM website - link