FOSDEM 2014 Recap
I was happy to be able to squeeze in a short trip to attend FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels last weekend. With several thousand attendees, FOSDEM is one of the largest free/open source software conferences.
Here’s a summary of how I spent my time at the conference. (What little I saw of Brussels itself was lovely, and a bit warmer than Stockholm.)
Saturday
I arrived on the ULB campus, after a very crowded bus ride, just in time for the Welcome to FOSDEM 2014 talk. Then I stayed in the same room for the next two Keynotes:
- How we found a million style and grammar errors in the English Wikipedia
- Software Archaeology for Beginners (with some good advice for joining an open source project)
Next I went to check out the near-capacity Mozilla devroom, and saw short talks on * State of Firefox OS * Mozilla Persona
After that it was time to grab lunch and join a nice little geocaching meetup.
I considered returning to the Mozilla devroom, but realized I was already somewhat familiar with the current Mozilla projects. Instead I went to see some Lightning talks, where I learned about a few interesting projects:
- The Linux kernel on dragon wings: Compiling the Kernel with LLVM/clang
- Software engineering tools based on syscall instrumentation
- Listaller: A simple and secure way to distribute 3rd-party applications (the topic of distribution-independent packaging was also well-represented on the Distributions devroom schedule, and in the MediaGoblin talk I attended later)
- An overview of Sozi: SVG-based zooming presentation software (a nice approach to Prezi-like presentations)
Then I did go back to the Mozilla devroom, to see Bas Schouten (who I was acquainted with from last summer) give a nice talk on Utilizing GPUs to accelerate 2D content.
I ended my day in the Legal and policy issues devroom. Christopher Allan Webber of GNU MediaGoblin spoke on The road ahead for network freedom; I think this is one of the most important computing issues today, and I’m glad MediaGoblin and others are doing the hard work to create alternatives to centralized services. I stayed for an Open Source Governance best practices roundtable.
Sunday
I got an early start (and in doing so, beat the worst of the bus crowds) in the Graph processing devroom, with
- Graphbuilder
- From 0 to a complex webapp in 30 minutes
- Fast and Memory Efficient Road Routing with GraphHopper (which looked surprisingly simple, fast, and effective)
- The LDBC Social Graph Data Generator
Then I headed to the Internet of things devroom for
After getting a tasty vegan lunch, I went to a talk on the Security track: USE OTR or how we learned to start worrying and love cryptography.
Then it was time for the PGP keysigning event. This means I traded IDs with 100+ other people (!), so that we can now all digitally vouch for each others’ identities.
The keysigning took the better part of two hours, leaving time for just one more talk before I needed to head back to the airport; I chose to go back to the Legal and policy issues devroom for a short discussion on Licensing Models and Building an Open Source Community.
It was a fun and very busy weekend!