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.