FOSDEM 2024

This weekend I decided to pay FOSDEM a visit (Thanks to Maarten from Appsterdam Coffee Coding group who brought this to my attention). FOSDEM, which stands for Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting, is a non-commercial and volunteer-organized event centered on free and open-source software. The 2024 edition of FOSDEM took place on February 3rd-4th at the ULB Solbosch Campus in Brussels, Belgium. It is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate, featuring a wide variety of activities. The event is known for gathering thousands of developers of free and open-source software from around the world. FOSDEM is a highly anticipated event in the open-source community, and it does not require registration; participants can simply turn up and join in. It was my first time at this legendary open-source developer gathering, and it was everything I imagined and more.

It was my first time here and I wan quite overwhelmed. They took over this huge campus and it was quite an adventure trekking through to find the right room for the talks. Speaking of which there were quite an overwhelming amount of talks and you had to queue up for some because space would quickly run out. A tip to myself for next time would be to prepare in advance for the talks I want to attend as I quickly realized my "winging it" approach wouldn't cut it. But that's the beauty of FOSDEM's open and spontaneous nature – I could dive into whatever piqued my curiosity

On the first day I chose to accept a free cookie form Mozilla(Delicous otameal raisin!). There were also a good selection of food carts.

There were a number of awesome stalls. Me being a sucker for hardware had quite a fun time with those ones. There was also this person in a PostgreSQL elephant costume. I also got a cool collapsable mug from Mozilla by finishing some quick tasks!

A phenomena I noticed was that everybody had these LED badges so I got some myself.(Probably going to do a cool project with this later)

I couldn’t catch all the talks I wanted to either because I didn’t get there in time or the rooms were full but fortunately I was able to navigate to a few interesting ones where I got to hunker down and take notes.

First up I noticed a talk about Biome. I had heard about them on the Syntax podcast so I had to go listen. Really interesting stuff! It can format invalid code which blew my mind. The talk was a deep dive on how it works

The Biome toolchain | Sojourner

Next there was a nice talk about JS Security. Covered some of the basics like how to avoid XSS and add CSP. My key take away from this was that it might be interesting to participate on of CTF events.

Staying Ahead of the Game: JavaScript Security | Sojourner

Of course there had to be a talk about JavaScript tooling in Rust but to be honest it was a little heavy for me. Quite interesting nonetheless.

Building your own JavaScript runtime with Rust | Sojourner

Next day stared off with this interesting talk in the web performance Devroom. It went into details of how third party banner ads are slow and have privacy issues and some strategies to improve Web Vitals like LCP and CLS.

From Google AdSense to FOSS: Lightning-fast privacy-friendly banners | Sojourner

Next learned a little bit about how the what, why and how of the new Firefox power profiling tool. This was quite interesting and I wonder if I can use some of the take aways to profile the low level devices I work with. Like to slide.

Firefox power profiling: a powerful visualization of web sustainability | Sojourner

Finally, I absolutely loved the talk about deploying Python on WASM. These are the sort of talks the nudges the inner hacker in me to try new things. Key take aways for me was: we can think of WASM as a virtualized CPU and that we can overcome the single threaded nature of it with some clever stack switching.

Deploy Your Next Python App with WebAssembly (Wasm): Smaller, Safer, Faster | Sojourner

After all these technical talks I always appreciate an afterparty to get a whiff of the vibrant community spirit. There was an unofficial afterparty hosted by Hackerspace Brussels which was a melting pot of music, laughter, and retro gaming. The Kimchi Waffle tho… was interesting.

Overall, had an awesome experience at FOSDEM 24. I hope to visit again next year— only this time more prepared. Leaving FOSDEM, I wasn't just armed with a cool collapsible mug and a head full of code; I felt connected to a global network of passionate developers pushing the boundaries of technology. Whether you're a seasoned coding veteran or a curious newcomer, FOSDEM is an experience that will leave you inspired and energized. So, mark your calendars for next year to be amazed!