January 31, 2025
The next few days are shaping up to be packed with open-source goodness!
I’ll be heading to CentOS Connect, FOSDEM, and CfgMgmtCamp, three of the best events in the ecosystem.
These conferences always include a great mix of technical talks, hallway conversations, and spontaneous meetups with friends—both old and new.
If you’re around, let’s catch up!
CentOS Connect (Brussels, January 31)
Although the event run yesterday and today, I’ll only be able to attend today.
CentOS Connect is a small but incredibly valuable event where the wider CentOS community (Fedora, CentOS, and all the Enterprise Linux distros) meets to discuss the space’s present and future.
It’s a great opportunity to meet contributors, learn about upcoming changes, and exchange ideas with people who shape the CentOS ecosystem.
I really like this event because its atmosphere is similar to Flock: very casual and more like a friends’ gathering than a conference.
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August 20, 2020
This year I managed to partecipate to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020.
As you can imagine, the conference did not happen in real life, but it was converted to an online conference.
More virtual conferences I attend to, more I understand the limits and the advantages of them compared to real conferences.
In this particular conference, I realized that one of the biggest problems I have with virtual conferences is that, during the conference, the conference events and talks add to your usual events and meetings, making it impossible to follow all events you wanted to follow.
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August 10, 2020
This year Flock did not happen due to COVID-19, and in its place, Fedora Nest happened.
After many events I’ve seen going virtual in the last few months, I was skeptical.
I was yet to see an acceptable online platform to run events.
I was wrong on the platform.
Fedora Nest used Hopin, which is by far the best platform for events I’ve seen so far.
Don’t get your expectations too high, though, because when I say the best one I’ve seen so far, only means that it is usable, and it does not mean in any way that is on par of real conferences.
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February 2, 2020 - Bruxelles, BE
This year, as it has happened for the last few years, I’ve been at FOSDEM.
As always, I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and that’s why I continue to go there, and every time I have to suggest other people which events to attend in Europe, I always mention FOSDEM as the main event.
I think it’s fascinating to see how room sizes and crowdedness of the rooms changes over time.
Years ago, the container-related rooms (containers, container security, Go) were relatively small, but already crowded, and over the years, the rooms got bigger and bigger.
Every year they have been very crowded to the point that for the majority of sessions, some people were turned away.
This year this pattern continued for those rooms, except for the Go one, which had a massive improvement in size, and, as far as I know, it never turned away people due to the over-crowdedness.
I think this speaks clearly on the importance that containers are getting in those years and the fact that they are quickly moving.
If there were no innovations in the container space for the whole year between two FOSDEMs, I think many people would prefer to go to other rooms.
I think this is what is happening to the Go room.
Even though I really appreciate the Go room and the Go language, I think it will shrink over the next years because - as it’s sane for a programming language - Go is not getting tons of new features every year.
Due to this lack of news, people that already know the language might opt for different rooms since, at FOSDEM, there are always many exciting talks at the same time.
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January 27, 2020 - Brno, CZ
As it happened at other times in my life, I managed to be present at DevConf.
DevConf is one of the best conferences that I attend.
The reasons are many and varied, starting from the location that I find relatively stress-free.
Another reason is the fact that there are many different kinds of sessions, and many sessions are not overcrowded, so it is relatively simple to participate in any session you would like to.
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February 4, 2019 - Bruxelles, BE
This year, as it has happened for the last few years, I’ve been at FOSDEM.
As always I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and that’s why I continue to go there, and every time I have to suggest other people which events to attend in Europe, I always mention FOSDEM as the main event.
This year, differently from previous editions, I tried to stick to a single room both days, being mostly in the Go room on Saturday and in the Containers room on Sunday.
I made this decision since I’ve seen the advantages of last year experience, where being in the same room for a whole day allowed me to follow more talks and to stress less.
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February 4, 2018 - Bruxelles, BE
This year, as it has happened for the last few years, I’ve been at FOSDEM.
As always I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and that’s why I continue to go there, and every time I have to suggest other people which events to attend in Europe, I always mention FOSDEM as the principal event.
This year, differently from previous editions, I tried to stick to a single room during Saturday (the Go one).
Being in the same room for the whole Saturday allowed me to follow more talks (no time wasted moving from a room to another and less sitting problems :D) which was convenient since I wanted to follow all talks in that room anyway.
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June 23, 2017 - London, UK
This year, I decided to go to AnsibleFest.
Since the day before AnsibleFest, an Ansible Contributor Conference was scheduled, I decided to partecipate to both.
On Wednesday morning I arrived to the location and I had the pleasure of speaking with few people before the begin of the Contributor Conference.
The Contributor Conference was very interesting and I had the occasion to speak with many other people over the course of the day.
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February 5, 2017 - Bruxelles, BE
FOSDEM is a must for all open source enthusiast in Europe and close by.
I think that the reasons to go to FOSDEM are different from the reasons of many other conferences, but equally valid.
The comparison with DevConf is obvious, due to the temporal closeness of the two events.
I think that DevConf is more about enterprise grade software (or close to be), while FOSDEM is more about experimentations and community.
The causes for this are probably obvious if you consider that DevConf is mainly sponsored by Red Hat, while FOSDEM is completely community driven.
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January 29, 2017 - Brno, CZ
I think this is a special moment of the year, where in less than two weeks is possible to meet a huge amount of Open Source contributors in person.
Obviously you will need to take few flights, but it’s definitely worth.
DevConf this year was great.
I’ve been able to assist to a huge amount of talks (more than 20) and the majority of which were very interesting.
As always in conferences, there are themes heavily discussed and other completely absent.
This year at DevConf (like in many others conferences) containers are a very big topic.
The other big topic (related, but different) was Modularization, an approach Fedora is trying to
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog