Next weekend there’s FOSDEM, a huge Open Source conference in Brussels, Belgium . And like every year, the schedule is both insanely large and scary. So this year, I’ve decided to take my picks beforehand, instead of trying to figure things out when I get there.
The FOSDEM schedule is available online and you can view it in different styles: by room or by track/time . Both views are confusing and hard to work with. I personally prefer the dayviews of saturday or the dayview of sunday . It surely shows the scale of Fosdem!
I couldn’t do a better job at the layout myself. After all, there are 25 (!!) rooms where tracks are going on. How the heck do you make a clear overview of that? Quite the challenge, indeed.
Saturday, January 31th 2015#
Here are my picks for Saturday. Since it’s weekend after all, I won’t start too early.
10:30h – 11:30h: How to have a constructive conversation about awful infrastructure code (H.1309 (Van Rijn))
11:30 h -12:30h: Better Devops through Thievery (H.1309 (Van Rijn))
*food!*
13:00h – 13:55h: How CoreOS is built, modified, and updated (H.1302 (Depage))
14:00h – 14:55h: Are distributions really boring and a solved problem? (H.1302 (Depage))
15:20h – 15:50h: Puppet Plus Parentheses (H.2214)
16:00h – 17:00h: Orchestration of Services with Juju (H.1309 (Van Rijn))
And then I’ll call it a day.
Sunday, February 1st#
This’ll hurt, as I’m starting the day quite early.
09:00h – 09:40h: Under the hood of Docker (UD2.120 (Chavanne))
09:40h – 10:20h: Docker Integration in oVirt and IaaS (UD2.120 (Chavanne))
10:00h – 10:50h: PHP Package Design (H.1301 (Cornil))
11:00h – 11:40h: Provision and manage Docker containers with Foreman (UD2.120 (Chavanne))
11:30h – 12:25: What’s new in systemd, 2015 Edition (H.1302 (Depage))
*food!*
13:00h – 13:50h: The state of PHPUnit (H.1301 (Cornil))
14:00h – 14:50h: PHP7 (H.1301 (Cornil))
15:00h – 15:50h: Ntimed an NTPD replacement (PHK!) (K.1.105 (La Fontaine))
16:00h – 16:50h: (re)Discovering SPL (H.1301 (Cornil))
*home*
Missed opportunities#
I’m sorry to see so little “beginner” talks this year, especially in the devrooms. For instance, with all the languages having their own room (PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, …) I would have loved a “getting started with X” talk. I could only find a getting started with Ada talk, but I’m not that into embedded systems programming.
More introductory talks would be a great opportunity to get to know a language a little better and have someone guide you through the first steps. Sure, there’s the internet, blogs and guides – but a motivated speaker that can explain things in a clear and focussed manner? That’s what can get people excited about a new language.
Maybe next year? I just might submit a beginner talk or two on some subjects as well then.