Marcin Juszkiewicz - fosdem

FOSDEM 2021 was the best online event ever

2021-02-08T10:53:00+01:00

My family got used to the fact that I am not available at beginning of February. Because of my FOSDEM trip. This year was not both not so different and different at same time.

Due to COVID-19 pandemic FOSDEM 2021 was online. So there was no reason for any trip other than to local shops to buy some Belgian beers. And I was not available to anyone during weekend.

Online? It will be terrible!

During 2020 I attended several online events. For some of them I prefer to not remember that I did it. Terrible recordings of talk, some had bandwidth issues. On some organizers did not managed to get presenters agree on online presence so some meetings had to be dropped when they were supposed to start.

Matrix to the rescue

FOSDEM team decided to organize some way for attendees to chat with each other. Matrix was setup on chat.fosdem.org with some rooms for basic FOSDEM stuff, room for each devroom, rooms for continuing discussion after talk… There was also “Virtual Janson Bar” one for food/drink discussions (renamed to “Virtual Delirium” for after conference hours).

Cloakroom had own channel, food trucks had another one. People were sending photos of their food/waffles/beer/etc.

FOSDEM @fosdem tweeted:

Oh and before you leave don’t forget to pickup your luggage and coat at the cloackroom https://chat.fosdem.org/#/room/#cloakroom:fosdem.org 🙃

Nearly every room had widget with Jitsi for video chat. It was used mostly for Q&A sessions and after talk discussions.

And it worked good. There were hot discussions with questions asked during talk and then replied during Q&A session. Links to many projects and interesting additional pages were posted that way.

Streaming all the way

One of things FOSDEM is famous for is networking at event. And live streaming of all rooms. This year was no different. My monitor’s screen was split to two Firefox windows: left side kept discussions on Matrix server, right side had live streaming schedule and video of currently attended talk. At same time my phone has “FOSDEM Companion” app started with bookmarks opened to make it easy to check which talks I wanted to see.

At some moments I had two videos started — one waited for start of presentation and second with some other talk running. Once new one started I closed watched one. Simple method of watching part of talk to see is it interesting or not.

There were some talks where I dropped during first few minutes and moved to other one. Something quite hard to do when you are in a middle of a room at normal FOSDEM.

Videos of talks will be available during next few days. I have a page with FOSDEM talks with slides/video links which will get updates during next days.

At same time at ULB…

Normally FOSDEM takes place in Brussels at ULB. There were some attendees there so we had messages like that on Matrix:

I went to tram and is was nearly empty. Did I messed timezones or what?

I got permission from Luilegeant to post some pictures from ULB so you may see what we missed this year:

FOSDEM 2021

Entry to J building

Janson bar was closed

crane instead of food trucks

Looks like typical FOSDEM weather ;D

Some final words

I enjoyed FOSDEM 2021. It was different that usual ones but adding Matrix for chat allowed to get that feeling of being with other attendees. I hope that online events in 2021 will copy it.

Shin Ice @_ShinIce tweeted

#FOSDEM21 is coming to an end and it was awesome as always 🤘

we have an estimation of ~33.6k attendees for the conference and ~20k attendees for today…impressive…and now take this numbers and try to fill the ULB 😱

Compare that with usual 8-9 thousands in previous years.

There were many people from other continents taking part in conference just because being online allowed them. For several of them it was night time all the time.

See you at ULB in 2022!

FOSDEM 2020

2020-02-04T12:53:00+01:00

FOSDEM. In my opinion the best IT conference. Each year. And I was there for 12th time.

Insane amount of talks (893 this time) allows to choose more than it is possible to see. Which is good because with thousands of attendees it is often impossible to enter the room. Having some headphones helps as everything is live streamed so later there are videos to download (mostly after conference as they go through review process).

Friday

Woke up at 3:45, shower, breakfast, taxi at 4:30, bus at 5:00, plane at 8:40 (TXL -> BRU). Met a friend at the bus, watched 2nd episode of “Star Trek: Picard” and tried to conserve energy for the rest of a day.

Landed, took a train to Brussels Nord, added some tickets to MOBIB card and went to CentOS Dojo as usual on FOSDEM’s Friday.

Cloud SIG talk turned into discussion how many projects are waiting for their packages. Thorsten’s talk about CentOS on desktop had some interesting points — you install once and use to the death of hardware. Then went to talk about Software Collections. It was Jan’s first presentation ever and went quite ok.

Skipped armhfp talk and went for some food. And then hours at Delirium. I know that crowd makes more and more people going somewhere else. I go there as it is easy way to discuss with friends or people who recognize me.

Saturday

Took 71 bus at first stop and then went for talks…

Thorsten gave a great talk about changes in Linux kernel over twenty years. I was a bit late so watched whole talk on my way back home.

Next one was about selfish contributors. By James Bottomley. Great one! Interesting comparisons. Worth watching.

I skipped some talks from my list and discussed with several friends instead.

Next one was in AW - Stylo editor. Looked as done by academics for academics. Interesting approach. Not something for me but I understand why it was created.

UEFI: edk2 and U-Boot. Two interesting talks one after another. I wonder will my home desktop pass SCT.

Wanted to attend talk about loading fonts but room was already full. So decided to visit Embedded room instead.

Talk about Yocto Project tools was boring. But it turned out that friend leads devroom so we had nice talk during break.

Sudo talk was full so decided to go back to the hotel. Dropped stuff and went for some food and beer with friends.

Sunday

Early wake up, breakfast and then we took a risk of getting 71 on 3rd stop. Interesting challenge. Managed to squeeze into the second bus.

First was one about Thunderbird. There are interesting changes coming. Enigmail and Lighting will be integrated and new UI will come too.

Then Community room. During first talk Matt listed several chat platforms used by current generation of contributors. IRC was not one of them. I am old.

Next was about ethics in Open Source. Kind of “are all four freedoms are always needed”. Worth watching.

Then pile of bad luck. Virtualization devroom was full. I planned to attend talk about virtio-fs which just went into kernel and lands in qemu.

Open Source Design one had long queue. Once I managed to enter room, I left. No seats so UI/UX tricks have to wait in queue of videos to watch.

Went back to the K building. Took polar from cloakroom (left there a day before) and went for “coreboot on AMD processors” talk. Met Marek so decided to allow other people go. It was “go for fun” category anyway as I no longer have any hardware supported by this project.

As I got tired, there could be just one decision: go to Janson to find a good seat for Maddog’s talk and all after.

Talk about postmarketOS and Maemo Leste showed that not much changed since Openmoko times. Long list of different attempts to make OS for mobile phones. And that there are people still using Nokia n900 “so called phone”.

Maddog was old as usual. Great talk. Definitely to watch if you missed.

And then was one about FOSDEM history. Several facts, funny moment with name of organizer of first OSDEM (watch video!). Have to watch it again as presenter was quite hard to understand. Turned out that attendees took “come in oldest FOSDEM t-shirt you have” serious as each year was covered!

Exhausted went to the hotel. Dropped stuff, ate something and went for beer with friends. And sleep. Without friends.

Monday

This time OpenEmbedded workshop organized by Philip Balister. Was good to meet some old friends.

Talks went from containers to BSPs, signing binaries and some other stuff I skipped.

Last talk was about past, present and future. Here I tried to help with some facts. And idea of collecting history of OE came. Will look at it - wiki page should be enough. Just finding facts and people who remember will take time.

Videos

During meeting I download set of videos for way back home.

“18 years of Blender” was great! I spent nearly an hour at TXL airport watching “Elephant’s dream”, “Big Buck Bunny”, “Sintel” and “Tears of steel”. Will watch rest of them the other day.

Turned out that talk about font loading was worth fetching. Have to check my blog and maybe do some tweaks.

One about coreboot was like I expected. Skipped most of it to check what was on slides.

Nouveau status update I ended even faster. Will check website is there any hope for using it on GTX 1050Ti as so far I use closed source one.

Summary

Will I go next year? Sure, I do — I can not afford to not be there.

How to survive FOSDEM

2019-10-15T10:36:00+02:00

FOSDEM. Free Open Source Developers European Meeting. Every first weekend of February. In Brussels. At Université libre de Bruxelles.

I used to say that FOSDEM is a week-long conference compressed into two days. I don’t think it is valid any longer. Should say two weeks now as in the 2025 it was something about 1100 talks. Still during two days.

I also used to say that I can not afford not being at FOSDEM. It is probably the easiest way to meet developers from all the projects I have worked with or was interested in.

But how to survive FOSDEM? Food. Logistics. Clothes. Logistics. Mobile app.

Logistics

Yes, logistics is one of the key factors when it comes to this conference.

Lectures take place in several buildings (AW, H, J, K, U). At the same time. Getting from one to another takes time. You can meet people on a way and decide to discuss something rather than go for a talk.

There is an online navigation tool to show you which way to go from one place to another. This is very handy, especially if you have some mobility issues.

FOSDEM map

Sometimes it is worth being in the same room for a session beforehand just to get a seat. Limits are taken seriously and when the info on door says “room full” then do not even try to sneak in. You may find a spot and watch live streaming — just remember to have good headphones to not interrupt people around you.

If you need a place to sit for a bit with your laptop, you can go to cafeterias in the F building (crowded, noisy).

Hotel

Get a place to sleep in the city centre. “Crawling distance from Delirium Café” is perfect as this is where a lot of people spend Friday and Saturday evenings/nights. Also there are several places to get various food, some grocery stores (just check opening hours), pharmacies, GSM shops etc.

Public transport

Use whatever you normally use (Google Maps or similar) to check for public transport. If possible, avoid bus 71 if you go at a popular time and not from the first stop. It gets full right from the start and stays that way until the FOSDEM stop.

FOSDEM transportation page lists several options on how to get to/from ULB.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Up to the 2023 edition there were free buses from ULB to Brussels South (Midi) railway station on Sunday afternoon (15:30 - 19:30). There gave an easy way to get to BRU airport, but they are not provided any more.

After the event, one of the options is getting to Etterbeek railway station (about a 1.5 km walk) and then travelling wherever you need. This is my favourite way to go from FOSDEM to the BRU airport on Sunday evening.

Tickets

When it comes to tickets…

First of all, check STIB ticket information for options as they change from time to time.

Nowadays (2023+), it looks like using a bank card is the easiest way. Just enter the bus/metro/tram and tap to pay.

Note that there are some single-use tickets still in use if you prefer not to use a bank card.

Clothes

FOSDEM is in February. Which means winter. So it may mean snow, but it is Brussels, so usually it is either nice or rainy. And you will go into a building and out of building several times per day. Be prepared for it.

Wear proper shoes to walk on concrete and steps, but also on snow, mud and grass. Winter cap, scarf, maybe even gloves. They do not have to be thick ones like for an Arctic winter. Assume a few degrees above 0°C.

When it comes to clothing — wear layers. You will enter/leave packed rooms, buildings so it is easier to just take out jacket and still keep being worm. Also note that there is a cloakroom in the K building (ground floor, at the end of north corridor) — you can leave jacket, baggage there. Just remember to pick it up in the evening (on Saturday too).

Bring a small backpack and a bottle of water. Do not throw it away once it gets empty. You are at a university. You can refill your bottle at several places. Tap water is drinkable.

You may consider wearing a face mask. With thousands of attendees, from all over the world, it is easy to get “a FOSDEM flu”.

Mobile application

As long as your phone is able to run applications, check the Mobile schedule apps page on the conference website and choose one. I use ‘FOSDEM Companion’ on my Android phone.

Install the application at least a week before the event. Synchronize the schedule and start checking which sessions to attend. Ignore the fact that some will overlap. It is always better to have more listed than less — sometimes you sacrifice one due to being in the wrong building or a room will be full so you can take a quick look at the list and go somewhere else.

Internet access

Once you reach FOSDEM there is no problem — conference area provides you fast wireless network access.

If you are from one of the EU countries, then your GSM operator probably provides you with some data limit for “Roaming Like At Home” functionality.

If you are from outside of the EU, then I suggest reading the prepaid with data wiki page. GSM operators stores are in several places in city centre. Or you may even manage to find some at airport but easier to just grab one once you reach centre.

Food

Eat a proper breakfast. Not “just a fruit and coffee” but a proper one. You may not have time to stand in a queue for some FOSDEM food. It is not worth your time.

A better option is to just have something with you. Get fruits, nuts, energy bars, chocolate. Some kind of quick calories.

Or spend half an hour (or more) waiting for fast food. This is still a good opportunity to chat with people.

If you want to pay with cash, then use an ATM before getting to FOSDEM area as there is no ATM at ULB.

Social events/gatherings during evenings

There are several social events/gatherings organized by different groups and organizations during Friday/Saturday evenings.

In the past, there was a beer event on Friday evening. Since 2008, it took place in Delirium Café pub (later on whole street leading to it). Many people still go there on Friday. It can be hard to get there due to the number of people. It was an easy way to meet far too many familiar faces. And get a beer (once you managed to reach the bar). Nowadays, many people avoid it due to the crowd.

Beer

Remember that Belgian beer can be stronger than your normal one. Do not drink too much or you will suffer and be too wasted during conference.

Trash

Do not put your trash in random places. Use trashcans, and inform organizers and volunteers if you see full ones. Put bottles into places for bottles.

If you can, then stay after the ending session and help to clean up. It is free event, so help those who have organised it for you.

Swag

FOSDEM is a free event. But there is swag. You can go to organizers’ desk and donate money to keep the event going. For 25€ you can get the official t-shirt.

Several projects have their own stands — mostly in K building but there are also other ones in AW (usually related to embedded space) and in H building.

If you are a stickers fan (or your new laptop still have some space on its case) then go on a tour, discuss with developers, and see what they are presenting. Grab leaflets, stickers, donate some money (usually in exchange to more premium swag) etc.

Or some funny one like this license for VLC I got in 2019:

Physical VLC license

Fiancé(e) or family

If your companion is not interested in FOSDEM, you may sign them up for free tour(s). My wife came with me to the conference once, went for a tour each day and enjoyed them.

Other events

There are several meetings taking place right before and/or after FOSDEM.

CentOS Project has event before FOSDEM. It is a nice opportunity to meet developers working on this distribution.

After FOSDEM you can attend OpenEmbedded workshop. Or go to Ghent (short train trip away) for CfgMgmtCamp (Config Management Camp).

Several other projects are having own meetings, developer days etc. You can check list at FOSDEM Fringe page.

After FOSDEM

During FOSDEM all sessions are recorded. If you are speaker then you will get an email with a link to the system where you can approve recording for publication.

My page about FOSDEM videos lists all talks given at FOSDEM since 2012. With links to slides and video recordings (if available). It provides an easy way to check all those sessions where you were not present or want to watch them again.

Devconf.cz? FOSDEM? PTG? Linaro Connect?

2018-01-19T19:29:00+01:00

What connects those names? All of them are conference or team meeting names. Spread over Europe + Asia. And I will be on all of them this year.

First will be in Brno, Czechia. Terrible city to travel to but amount of people I can meet there is enormous. Some guys from my Red Hat team will be there, my boss’ boss (and boss of my boss’ boss) and several people from CentOS, Fedora, RHEL (and some other names) communities. Meetings, sessions… Nice to be there. Will be in A-Sport hotel as it is closest to Red Hat office where I have some meetings to attend.

Then FOSDEM. The only “week-long conference squeezed into two days” I know. Good luck with meeting me probably. As usual my list of sessions covers all buildings and have several conflicts. Will meet many people, miss even more, do some beers. This year I stay in Floris Arlequin Grand-Place hotel.

Next one? OpenStack PTG in Dublin, Ireland. Finally will meet all those developers reviewing my patches, helping me with understanding source code of several OpenStack projects. And probably answering several questions about state of AArch64 support. Conference hotel.

Linaro Connect. Hong Kong again. Not registered yet, not looked at flights. Have to do that sooner than later and checking which airline sucks less on intercontinental connections sucks too. With few members of SDI team I will talk about our journey through/with OpenStack on our beloved architecture. Conference hotel.

What after those? Probably OpenSource Day in Poland, maybe some other ones. Will see.

I may go back to Linaro

2016-01-25T14:37:00+01:00

Few days ago my manager asked me if I would like to go back to Linaro. This time not as ‘Linaro-but-Canonical engineer’ but as ‘Red Hat assigned engineer’. That made me thinking…

Those three years at Linaro were good time. Learnt a lot about cross toolchains, got possibility to work on bootstrapping AArch64 support in OpenEmbedded, Debian/Ubuntu and then Fedora/RHEL. Met many skilled people from around the world, travelled into places which I would probably not visit on my own.

Going back sounds good. From my discussions with few people from Linaro there is more and more AArch64 related work there (and I have some hardware at home) so my rusty arm32 skills can rust in peace. Have to take a closer look at what exactly is on a plate there to take and find some place.

So if you work for Linaro and will be at FOSDEM (or devconf.cz) then I would love to talk.

FOSDEM and Devconf.cz trip

2016-01-05T22:15:00+01:00

As two years and year ago I plan to make conference combo: FOSDEM in Brussels and then Devconf.cz in Brno. Weekend after weekend. But this time I want to make it different.

First I thought that will skip devconf.cz one. But this is quite important Fedora conference so checked how to make it cheaper that in previous years. And found out few deals and setup a trip which should be interesting.

From home to SXF and then with Ryanair to Brussels. Visit friends, meet friends, make some beers, attend talks, discuss with strange and familiar people — like each time during FOSDEM.

Then fly to Bratislava, Slovakia (Ryanair from CRL) and stay there for few days. Visit some places, do some Ingress missions, buy fridge magnet — typical tourist stuff.

From there take a train to Brno. Stay at some cheap ho(s)tel, attend devconf.cz conference, do some beers, meet friends etc. Like on normal conference.

And from there go back home by train. With one hour break at Berlin Hbf station.

Have to fill a form to arrange PTO for Bratislava and buy some tickets. Hope that it will be fun trip.

Conferences in February

2014-01-30T09:35:00+01:00

Next month will start with conferences… Tomorrow I go for FOSDEM 2014 then one day break (to change bags) and then Devconf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic.

It will be 6th visit at FOSDEM for me. I do not plan to man a booth for any project and hope to find time to visit at least few talks — this year list is quite long:

A Method for Distributing Applications Independent from the Distro
Anatomy of kdbus
ARM: Allwinner sunxi SoC’s and the community behind it
CentOS: Planning for Variants and the Next Chapter
Ceph
Considering the Future of Copyleft
Cross Distro Automation
Debian Contributors
Discover DoudouLinux live!
GNURadio as a general purpose DSP environment
How we found a million style and grammar errors in the English Wikipedia
Introducing the Meson build system
IP risks for OSS developers
Is distribution-level package management obsolete?
Legal issues from a radical community angle
lima driver: Opening up the Mali instruction set
Lumicall — an open alternative to Viber
MINIX 3 on ARM
No more IPv4
Nouveau — On-going work, demos and research
OpenJDK on AArch64 Update
OpenPandora and a peek into the future
osmocom: Overview of our SDR projects
Persistent Memory
Porting FreeBSD on Xen on ARM
Reproducible Builds for Debian
Software Archaeology for Beginners
State of the X.org foundation
State of Thunderbird
Sunxi KMS driver
Technical introduction to the deeper parts of Sailfish OS, a Qt5-Wayland based mobile OS
Testing Kernel GFX Drivers
The evolution of Android’s runtime
The Lima driver
UEFI is not your enemy
Virtualization Dungeon on ARM
Who ate my battery?
Why You Should Be an Open Source Project
Xen on ARM

As usual it would be success if I will manage to see 30% of them as for me FOSDEM is a place to meet people from other projects to share ideas rather than spend time on sessions.

Next will be Devconf.cz but first ARM Hackfest a day before at Red Hat office (an option to check my badge). This conference is more Fedora related and I hope to meet interesting people there to discuss how to do some things. No talks selection as there will much smaller amount of them so I can do it between sessions ;D

If you want to catch me at conferences then use Google Hangout, Facebook Messenger or just mail me. I plan to have local SIM card to be always online.

FOSDEM 2013

2013-02-05T11:30:00+01:00

Year ago we had Linaro Connect right after FOSDEM so I decided to skip and walk to Golden Gate instead. But this year there were no conflicts!

Months before we had discussion on SzLUUG mailing list about who goes for FOSDEM. There were about 9 people wanting and we ended with five. So on Friday morning friends arrived near my house, I jumped into car, we grabbed 4th one (Tomek was in London at that time) and went to Berlin Schönefeld airport for 07:00 Easyjet flight.

And we missed it… 5-10 minutes late we were ;( 75€ per person and 10 hours later he took off from SXF airport.

But that 10h was not wasted. Berlin has very nice Technical Museum with many trains, cars, planes and other exhibitions. And they had Trabant 601 as well:

My first time in Trabant

Then trip to shops (Saturn, Media Markt) in search for HTC Desire X case (Magda) and LG Nexus 4 (me). Avoid Saturn — they do not handle credit card payments at Alexanderplatz so I had to walk to the ATM. Two S-Bahns later we passed security check and went to the gate early enough to fly.

BRU airport… I think that (with exception of SXF/TXL) it is my most visited airport as it was my 5th FOSDEM and there was UDS-M around as well. But this time we took a bus instead of a train. 14€ ticket works for 72 hours so cover all trips perfectly. Few hours later we were joking that this multi country journey was exhausting as we were in Berlin, Brussels, went though Geneve (bus stop) to Luxembourg (square) and passed near London (restaurant) ;D

Hotel, drop stuff, connect chargers, went for beer event. Crowdy as usual it was. But I managed to meet some friends (but also missed lot of them) and grabbed few beers. Good spent time. Too bad that I was so tired that went back to hotel just right after midnight.

Saturday

Breakfast in St. Nicolas hotel maybe is not the best but provides enough energy to survive a day. Met several guys there, Philip gave me Kindle Paperwhite which I bought few days before (with delivery to his house to lower price) and his famous Belgium/Holland/Luxembourg guidebook. I also got Beagle pendrive from Koen.

Beagle pendrive

Then overcrowded bus 71 and FOSDEM! I told Bartek where things are (but at that time I had no idea of K building) and we split. In AW building I met friends manning OpenEmbedded stand just right in front of building entry.

OpenEmbedded stand

Circuitco had Beaglebone stand right to it:

Beaglebone robot

That robot was great example what you can do with enough signals available to drive all those motors. And what you can do with 3D printers ;D

I do not know is it due to crisis or something but AW building had just half of a space for stands used…

Then I went for talks:

“Embedded distro shootout: buildroot vs. Debian” — wasted time. Long discussion about Emdebian + short info that Buildroot works in other way. Could be nice talk if done in other way.
“Porting Fedora to 64-bit ARM systems” — talk done by Jon Masters and his clone. As usual first “what the hell is 64-bit ARM” and then how Fedora bootstraps itself. Nice talk, got some new stuff. Have to dig for Cavium SDK.
“Porting OpenJDK to AArch64” — interesting it was. Two speakers, lot of technical details.
“ARMv8, ARM’s new architecture including 64-bit” by Andrew Wafaa. Mostly to catch speaker in easy way ;D
“Bootstrapping Debian-based distributions for new architectures” - I was lazy to go somewhere else but it was good talk.
“Bootstrapping the Debian/Ubuntu arm64 ports” by Wookey. Kind of recycled talk from Barcelona but I like his presentations. Also first one without “what the hell is armv8” introduction.

I also had nice discussion with Jolla guys about their system/device and would I like to test it once they will have something ready for complains. Played a bit with Firefox OS on their reference developer platform and on Nexus S and was not impressed — for example it looked like they have to learn about DPI…

Then I met OE crew and few other guys and when finally noticed that it is time to go to the hotel and drop gear there. Once arrived it was a bit to late to go somewhere and search for some event so I joined SzLUUG team and we went for a meal, chocolates and then some drinking.

Sunday

Breakfast, packing gear and go for a bus which was less crowded than day before (but we are a bit late as well). As we had to leave after 14:00 I managed only two talks:

“systemd, Two Years Later” — some Ubuntu trolling and project status. Nice talk.
“Porting applications to 64-Bit ARM Architecture” by Riku Voipio (main AArch64 porter at Linaro). Good discussion in a room, some nice hints and suggestions. Read his recent blog post about ARMv8 porting

Then walk, tram, bus and security check. This time I did not have to take developer boards from backpack as I gave them away during event. We arrived in Berlin and (due to Michał’s fosdem flu) I drove us back home.

Summary

It was great event as usual. But distance between K building and rest was too big for sessions which are one after another. I dropped some entries from my calendar just because it would be H->K->H->K switching.

Android application for schedule was ok. Would be nice to make a bigger effort and update it to cover K building as well and add a way to see what is going on in each building/room to reduce time before sessions.

Funny part

On Saturday I realized that for some reason I may remind Jon Masters… That’s due to hardware I had with me:

two developer boards
two phones
two tablets
3 USB chargers
4 microUSB cables

The good thing is that they were not of same type (except some cables) :D