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Attending FOSDEM

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FOSDEM is a conference about developers and open source that is happening in Brussels the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of February.

I still have to make up my mind on which talks I'll attend, but I hope to meet a lot of awesome people!

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I've looked at the schedule and I decided to write down the talks that got my attention. I won't be able to attend all of them (some overlap and I'm not Dr. Manhattan). But it's good to have some fallbacks in case the rooms are full. I'll also be able to watch them afterwards because they should be recorded.

If you're going to any of those let me know! It'll be more fun if we can share our thoughts :).

I'll probably meet with some guys from the SAFE Network forum. I didn't know about the project, but they are also interested in Decentralization. So I'm sure some interesting conversations will come up.

Here's the list of talks:

Saturday

Sunday

I started the day attendimg the talk about software freedom, since I didn't make it in time for the keynote. It was interesting to see the struggles of trying to live without proprietary software. I didn't know the speakers, but I will look at their work at the Software Freedom Conservancy.

After that I went to the decentralization/privacy room and I didn't leave it the whole day! I expect to look around tomorrow and visit some stands.

The talks I enjoyed the most were Exodus, YunoHost and the ActivityPub panel. I also took the chance to salute Elliot from FunkWhale. I really like his project and I'll probably host my own instance at some point.

Last day of Fosdem, the highlight of the day has been without a doubt Ruben Verborgh's presentation of Solid. If you don't know anything about Solid, or even if you do, I recommend that you watch the recording that will be uploaded here: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/solid_web_decentralization/

After the presentation I joined a small group of people to continue the conversation with him outside. The future that they are trying to create is very interesting, and even if Solid doesn't find widespread adoption, I'm still excited to see the communities that'll be created.

I also had the chance to speak with members of the SAFE Network project, who are very interested in using Solid on their network. After chatting for a while I understood the gist of what they do, and I believe it's a great initiative. The only thing I'm not convinced about is that it's an immutable data network, which means that data cannot be deleted, only modified (maintaining a modifications history).

Yesterday after the conference ended, I went to an IPFS meetup. I didn't know much about IPFS, so it was a good change to understand it better and meet new people.

One thing in particular that got my attention was IPLD, InterPlanetary Linked Data. Given my work with Solid, it'd be interesting to try and create a POD that stores data using IPFS combined with this. I still need to look into it more in depth, but at first glance seems like it would be possible by having a gateway/proxy that does the conversion between ipfs and Solid operations. Actually it isn't anything so uncommon, because that's exactly what a web server is doing, translating Solid operations into database or filesystem operations.

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