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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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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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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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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February 1, 2016 - Bruxelles, BE
Today is my last day in Brussels and since my flight back is pretty late in the afternoon I took the occasion to visit a little bit Brussels.
Fun fact is that after 4 days in Brussels for a FLOSS conference, I’ll spend my evening at my local Linux User Group!
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January 31, 2016 - Bruxelles, BE
This morning I’ve assisted to one of the most fun and interesting talk I’ve have ever seen.
I’m talking about the talk of Richard M Stallman on licensing and patents.
I’ve really liked how the talk has been conducted by the speakers and I think the contents were great (you can probably find it available online and if I’ll find a link, I’ll post it).
After Stallman’s talk, I went to listen Langdon White talk Re-thinking Linux Distributions.
I think this was a great talk, and even if I do not agree completely with Langdon, he made very good point and he explained a lot of things that are going on in the Fedora’s modularization effort.
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January 30, 2016 - Bruxelles, BE
After one day at FOSDEM, I’ve to admit that people are not lying when they affirm that FOSDEM is awesome.
It really is.
Today I had the occasion of following multiple very interesting talks.
The only problem I’ve found with the FOSDEM organization is that too often there are multiple very interesting talks at the same time and you have to pick only one (unless you have ubiquity capabilities, but I don’t).
I think one of the most interesting talk of the day - at least for me - was the Lennart Pottering one.
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January 29, 2016 - Bruxelles, BE
For years I wanted to attend some major FLOSS conferences, but I’ve never had the occasion since I’ve always had other things to do in the conferences dates.
This year, due to multiple causes and good planning, I’ve been able to go to FOSDEM :).
One thing that I like to do at all kind of events, but even more in big events, is to volunteer.
Volunteering, in my opinion, gives you big advantages, since you often can find very interesting people.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog