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Attending FOSDEM 2025

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New year, new FOSDEM!

Happening in Brussels on February 1st and 2nd. Let me know if you're around, and let's meet up.

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I'm not giving any talks this year, but it seems like many people I know are attending so it should be fun! It's also the 25th anniversary, and my fifth time attending.

As always, I'm not completely sure what I'll be doing; other than attending some talks, roaming the ULB campus, and eating mini-waffles. But there's a couple of things I'll do for sure. For example, it seems like this year we'll finally have a proper Solid meetup. There are also a couple of talks I'm very excited about, and I'd be remiss if I don't at least pass through the Open Source Design devroom.

Something I'm not very good at, though, is speaking with people I don't already know :/. It's a common saying that "the hallway track" is one of the highlights of the conference. But I can't say I've experienced much of it... Sure, I go through the stands, and ask a question or two. But I don't really interact with many new people in the conference. I've met some people at fringe events like the beer event, OFFDEM, or Bytenight. But I can't say I've actually met anyone at the conference. I guess I simply suck at notworking 🤷.

In any case, it should be fun either way! Honestly, it's just fun for me to be there and watch the talks :D. Here's a tentative schedule of things I may attend:

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Maybe I went a bit overboard this year with the bookmarks 😅. Well, in any case, this list will also serve me to watch recordings of the talks I miss :).

It would be fun to meet someone who actually reads this journal, so if you do come say hi!

Once again, it's a wrap.

Like always, I really enjoyed this year's FOSDEM. But in some ways, this one has been extra-special to me. More on this later.

As I anticipated, I didn't watch as many talks as I'd like. I'll have some catching up to do with the recordings. But I did attend a bunch. I really enjoy this mix of styles and interests at FOSDEM. You can find great speakers with flawless presentation skills, geeks talking about their projects in excruciating technical detail, and everything in between (with no offense to the geeks, I'd probably put myself on this category with my talk). Knowledge exchange at its peak.

One of my favourite talks this year was John O'Nolan's (ghost.org's founder) Networked Journalism: Bringing long-form publishing to the Fediverse. I particularly liked one of the ending statements: "If the product isn't great, being open doesn't matter". Yes! More design thinking in open source, please!

I also really enjoyed Today's fediverse: a good start, but there's more to do, by the two ActivityPub spec editors (Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Tallon). And Terence Eden's talk on ActivityBot, which unfortunately wasn't recorded (but TLDR, it's an ActivityPub server for bots written in a single PHP file :O). It was also fun to hear about the awesome work that NLNet has been doing, and will do, in Next Generation Internet 2025: where next?.

We even had a couple of Solid talks! Sébastien Rosset talked about ActivityPods (not recorded either), and Michiel de Jong talked about Solid, Local-First, and The Ultimate Bookkeeping System.

This last point is one of the reasons why I think this year's conference has felt different to me. I've been attending FOSDEM since 2019, but this was the first time that we've had multiple people from Solid attending. In a way, it was reminiscent of last year's Solid Symposium.

Which brings me to my biggest takeaway of the conference. As you may know, I quit my job some months ago, and I was planning to get back to work in January. But it's already February, and I still haven't got a response for my NLNet grant application from October. So I've been a bit in limbo for the last month. Doing some housekeeping, and even dipping my toes back in the job market. But I realized things aren't great, and it's more difficult than ever to find good opportunities without networking. So networking I did, and Lo and behold, my worries are over! (for now). One of the people I spoke with was Michiel de Jong. After sharing my worries, he was gracious enough to negotiate an extension to one of his active grants, and include me into a new milestone! We still have to formalize it, and it's not a whole grant, but this means that I'll be covered until I get a response for my grant application :D. What's even better, I'll be able to work on Aerogel, so in practice I can get started with my plans :). No more job searching for me!

So yeah, that's great news. When I look back to this year's FOSDEM, I think I will see it as an inflection point in my career. I still have to secure the full grant 🤞, but it seems like my plans are starting to take shape. It remains to be seen if the project takes off, which is the real challenge!

As I type this, I'm 5 hours away from boarding the flight back home. As is becoming tradition, I plan to visit my favourite sandwich shop, roam the streets for a bit, and spend the rest of the morning coding away at Muntpunt Library.

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