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Attending FOSDEM 2023

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After 2 years online, FOSDEM is back in person! This year I'm also presenting, so if you're around make sure to come by. FOSDEM will be held the 4th and 5th of February in Brussels.

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I've been to FOSDEM twice, in 2019 and 2020. It's probably my favourite conference, so I'm really looking forward to being there again! (not that I attend that many, though). This year it's also extra special, because I'm also presenting for the first time:

From Zero to Hero with Solid
(Yes, I spent way more time making this slide than I care to admit 😅️)

I've also had a couple of people from the Solid community telling me they'll be there, so in a way this will be my first in-person Solid meetup as well :).

The presentation is coming up nicely, although I worry it's too dense :/. It wasn't easy to condense what I've done in 4 years to 30 minutes. I've re-read all my journals and that's been fun. You could say the presentation is just a summary of those. Still, I'm sure it will be valuable even for those who've read them (it won't have any of the rambling! [like this one xD]).

I also gave sli.dev a try, which was promising. But after a couple of hours fighting with CSS I decided to go back to my trusty LibreOffice. I like the idea to make my presentations in code, and it certainly has a couple of features I envy. But in the end, I was too slow making things work that took me 2 minutes in LibreOffice (maybe I'm not good enough at CSS yet).

In any case, that's going well!

Like always, I won't be able to attend all the talks I'd like to. But here's the ones that got my attention:

Friday

  • Afternoon / Evening @ Delirium Café. Unfortunately, the Beer event has been cancelled this year :(. But I'm pretty sure many attendees will be there anyways, so I'll be sure to pay a visit.

Saturday

Sunday

And that's it, I've officially spoken at FOSDEM 🥳!

The talk went well, and I think people enjoyed it :). There were a couple of interesting questions as well. If you missed it or want to dig deeper, you can find both the slides and the video recording in the event page.

It was also nice meeting in person with some people I knew from the Solid forums and chats. And hopefully I've inspired someone in the audience to give Solid a try. Or if nothing else, to make better apps!

Tonight I'll probably be at HSBXL's Bytenight, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow's talks (specially the ones in the Open Source Design devroom). Yesterday I ended up going to both the OFFDEM launch party and the "unofficial" Beer Event (it was packed with people anyways, so I ended up in Toone Theatre which was a lot less crowded and quite nice).

Well, as the FOSDEM organizers aptly said, it's a wrap.

I have to say that this year may have been my best one yet :). Besides giving a talk, I met more people than ever and I enjoyed many of the talks.

One that was interesting was Penpot (it turns out the founder is from Barcelona and we have some acquantainces in common!). I haven't been using Figma much; I'm still using Photopea and Inkscape/GIMP for everything I do. And one of the reasons I haven't is their proprietary nature. So I'll be sure to give Penpot a try next time.

Another talk I enjoyed was Matrix 2.0. Excellent presentation, packed with awesome live demos, and Moodle even got a shoutout on the Matrix integration we're working on for the upcoming release. I'm not sure if I'll get to work on that, but I'd like to because I'm very interested in Matrix and all the work they're doing.

Once the conference came to a close, this time I stayed to help with the clean up. And I think I'm going to do that in the upcoming years as well, because it wasn't that much work and you also get to meet some of the volunteers. It'd be nice to volunteer full-time at some point as well, but to be honest I like watching the talks too much so I'm not sure if I'll ever get there.

Unfortunately, the end has been bittersweet because my go-to sandwich shop was closed :(. But hey, not everything always goes as planned! I'll try again next year.

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