I've been coming to Fosdem since 2019, and the things I like and dislike about it are pretty-much the same.
Apparently this time there were 8,000 people here, and I ended this year by getting asked to leave Janson because it wasn't safe to have the (many) people sitting on stairs and crowding at the back. I thought this may be getting worse, but then I found this old WhatsApp conversation from 2019 😀:
This is still one of the main things I dislike, alongside the regular flow of people coming-in during the talks, followed by then leaving en-masse when the Q/A section starts. A blog from this weekend lists a whole bunch of similar negatives which I think have been true as long as I can remember.
The flip-side is that the great stuff is still great. In my first year I was stunned to be able to find a talk on using Ada to write Train-control software next-door to a talk from IBM on Quantum SDK's. It's hard to find that diversity elsewhere.
My favourites from this year:
- The Ultimate Office Chair: Hacking a BMW Comfort Seat with an ESP32
- Probabilistic Turn-By-Turn Directions for Public Transport
- The state of open data in Czech public transport
- NoiseModelling and Its FLOSS Ecosystem for Environmental Noise Assessment
A couple of these were in the Railways and Open Transport devroom, where I spent most of Saturday afternoon. It was here I felt the other thing I love: community.
In that room were people who write travel Apps alongside people from the EU there to talk about opening-up mobility data. This was a room full of people who didn't necessarily agree on everything, but who wanted to work together to do something beneficial, and not just something for short-term commercial benefit. There aren't many places that feel like this right now, and it gives me hope to witness this.
I also had a minor win that in that my FOSDEM website/app became useful on the day as well as ahead of time for discovery. I've always found it useful for finding interesting talks, but this year the Timetable view I prototyped whilst I was there helped me in a couple of ways:
- reducing FOMO through allowing me to tactically give-up on talks at the same time I could simply never make
- giving focus by finding streams of talks in the same place.
(Red dots are the talks I had previously bookmarked)
Anyways, I'll be back again next year, as the bad isn't all that bad, and the good is still very good. Many thanks to all the organisers and volunteers for making this possible 🙇♂️.