As promised I'm starting catching up on blogging after being sick and traveling. Here's my report of what I saw and found interesting at this year's FOSDEM which was held the last weekend in Brussels.
On Friday evening I've tried to attend the FOSDEM beer event at Delirium Cafe but had a bad luck. At 21:30 the place was already packed with people. I managed to get access to only one of the rooms but it looked like the wrong one :(. I think the space is definitely small for all who are willing to attend.
During Saturday morning I did a quick sight-seeing most notably Mig's wine shop and the area around it since I've never been to this part of the city before. Then I took off to FOSDEM arriving at noon (IOW not too late).
I've spent most of my day at building K where project stands were and I stayed quite a long time around the Python and Perl stands meeting new people and talking to them about their upgrade practices and how they manage package dependencies (aka promoting Difio).
Fedora stand was busy with 3D printing this year. I've seen 3D printing before but here I was amazed of the fine-grained quality of the pieces produced. This is definitely something to have in mind if you are building physical products.
Red Hat's presence was very strong this year. In addition to the numerous talks they gave there were also oVirt and OpenShift Origin stands which were packed with people. I couldn't even get close to say hi or take a picture.
Near the end of the day I went to listen to some of the lightning talks. The ones that I liked the most were MATE Desktop and DoudouLinux.
The thing about MATE which I liked is that they have a MATE University initiative which is targeting developers who want to learn how to develop MATE extensions. This is pretty cool with respect to community and developers on-boarding.
DoudouLinux is a Debian based distribution targeted at small children (2 or 3 years old) based on simple desktop and educational activities. I've met project leader and founder Jean-Michel Philippe who gave the talk. We chatted for a while when Alejandro Simon from Kano came around and showed us a prototype of their computer for children. I will definitely give DoudouLinux a try and maybe pre-order Kano as well.
In the evening there was a Python beer event at Delirium and after that dinner at Chez Leon where I had snails and rabbit with cherries in cherry beer sauce. I've had a few beers with Marc-Andre from eGenix and Charlie from Clark Consulting and the talk was mostly about non-technical stuff which was nice.
After that we went back to Delirium and re-united with Alexander Kurtakov and other folks from Red Hat for more cherry beer!
Report of the second day of FOSDEM'14 on Sunday is here.
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