FOSDEM 2023 - A recap

This weekend I traveled to Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2023, although only for the first day (Saturday 4th, 2023). It hasn’t been my first one, but it has been the first massive event I have attended after the COVID-19 pandemic.

After the morning keynote, I had a quick look around the buildings where the event was hosted to visit the different stands of the many sponsors of the conference. Among the most interesting ones (for me personally, all the stands where really interesting in one way or another) where:

• Mozilla
• Gnome
• PosgreSQL
• VLC
• Grafana
• Ham Radio
• Esprino (I’m still amazed about the Bangle.js 2 watch that I bought there)
• And many, many others…
• … oh, and the food trucks! :-P

It’s unbelievable the amount of people that usually come to FOSDEM. On one side it’s probably one of the nicest things about this conference: the amount of poeple you can find talking about really interesting stuff, from personal projects or showing some electronics that they hack together, to someone announcing a new sorting algorithm - Glidesort (btw, it hit Hacker News top 10! - repo here: https://github.com/orlp/glidesort)

On the other side, it’s always a big struggle trying to get into the room you are interested in, as chances are many other people are interested as well, and most probably there is not going to be enough room for everyone.

FOSDEM tip: if you are interested in a session and fear that it’s one of the popular ones, go to the session before (or 2 before) the one you’re interested and don’t get out!

The only thing I really missed (and chances are that it happened on Sunday, the day I could not attend) was the classic PGP / GPG signing party :-(

Nevertheless, once again FOSDEM has been an amazing event that I will most probably repeat next year!

Some pictures from the event: