WIP FOSDEM post

content/posts/2019-02-04-fosdem.md

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+---
+title: FOSDEM
+date: 2019-02-04
+author: James McDonald
+type: post
+categories:
+ - Tech
+---
+It's big. Really big. Just looking at the timetable is daunting, let alone choosing
+which talks to attend.
+
+People come to FOSDEM from everywhere. I don't think I've ever heard such a
+wide selection of languages at the same place. It really brings home just how
+big FOSS is, and how many people care about it.
+
+# Venue
+
+I've never been to Brussels before. If there's one regret about my FOSDEM trip,
+it's that I didn't have more time to spend in this beautiful city full of fun,
+friendly people. I would definitely recommend visiting with some time to spare;
+I certainly will be again.
+
+Also, the beer. Oh my, the beer.
+
+FOSDEM itself is hosted by [Université Libre de Bruxelles
+(ULB)](http://www.ulb.ac.be/). The event takes up a
+[fair chunk](https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/rooms/) of the campus. This was again quite daunting, but the organisers
+took a lot of effort to make it easy to navigate from place to place with a lot
+of clear signage and timetable information.
+
+PGDay (see below) was at the Marriott Grand Place, which was pretty much a
+regular conference venue as far as the event was concerned. Free running coffee
+and a chair is all I require. I can recommend their steak, though.
+
+# Stands
+
+There were many stands run by all the FOSS projects we know and love. The
+stands were an odd experience compared to a "normal" conference.
+
+Generally speaking at conferences you have a few big corporations and a bunch
+of smaller companies. Everyone wants to sell you something you've never heard
+of and get your details so they can send you <s>spam</s>marketing information.
+
+Not at FOSDEM. Most of the time I found myself going up to these fantastic
+projects like Debian, GitLab or Apache and the conversation was mostly limited
+to "you guys are amazing, thanks for doing what you do".
+
+# Talks
+
+I managed to select a good few talks in the end. Sadly, some of them (looking at you,
+HTTP/3) were so popular they weren't possible to get in to. Luckily, all of them are recorded and available to view at TODO.
+
+Here's a sample of those I attended.
+
+## Crazy Java Internals - Evgeny Mandrikov
+
+A talk I really enjoyed that I selected largely at random.  Evgeny Mandrikov,
+works on [JaCoCo](https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/). They build code coverage
+information by looking inside Java class files which allows them to work with
+multiple JVM languages.  Unfortunately, it turns out that `javac` outputs code
+that... isn't quite what you'd expect. It can also be extremely different for
+the same code depending on the target JVM version. The talk had a series of
+interesting examples of compiler output bytecode demonstrating these issues and
+proving that when you're reverse engineering, sometimes you just have to make a
+guess.
+
+## PostgreSQL 11 - Magnus Hagander
+
+My colleague Magnus presented what's new and magical in PostgreSQL 11.
+
+## Netflix
+
+This was a slightly disappointing talk. He focussed a lot on the advantages of working
+closely with upstream FreeBSD and of publishing their improvements. That's all very
+true, but it's an odd pitch to a room full of people at an open source conference.
+
+There were some interesting details about the hardware Netflix use in their CDN
+caches and the areas they have to focus on for performance.
+
+# Matrix France
+
+## maddog
+
+# PGDay
+
+I also attended the FOSDEM PGDay the day before. This was a great event in its own
+right, with several great talks.
+
+Also I got a fluffy Slonik, so I feel I have formally joined the Postgres community
+now.
+
+I was particularly interested by a couple of the talks.
+
+## Anonymisation
+
+## Encryption
+
+# Thanks
+
+I'd like to thank the fantastic people who take the time and effort to organise
+this event. Having been marginally involved in running conventions, I've seen
+how hard it can be to wrangle these things. And this event is *ridiculously huge*
+(the statistics in the closing talk had us eating 200kg of waffles *alone*).
+The effort involved must be herculean. So, yeah, thanks!