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). The event takes up a fair chunk 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 ~~spam~~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. 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!

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