This year I was glad to go with my family, where everyone is quite computery. We all enjoyed it massively, even though we missed some particular plans.
Junior track
FOSDEM Junior, which was an obviously positive and promising new thing last year, has shown a pretty spectacular development this year: two days, two rooms in parallel, and some top-tier, world-leading computing educators: Scratch and MicroBlocks creator John Maloney, developers of MIT App Inventor, MicroBlocks, Hedy and other educational projects, champions of CoderDojo and other related public initiatives, and the makers of the gorgeous CoCube wirelessly programmable robots.
All the session leaders were so impressively nice and easy going with kids, sharing the joyful spirit of experimentaiton and discovery!
For us, the biggest impressions were creating a mobile app with MIT App Inventor, and the CoCube robots.
CoCube robot is about to grow a gripper to grab and shoot a puck.
Pauline Maas leads a TurtleStitch session, showing off her impressive electronic t-shirt
Hallway track
Of course, just seeing many people and many projects, including many original hardware or simply physical products, is exciting!
LibreSpace QUBIK apparently yearns outer space.
This is a Jolt.js bundle from Espruino, working as a plotter. Maybe we won’t need Cricut with this thing.
The current hotness - Meshtastic peer-to-peer radio messaging devices.
Quite refreshing new stream of activity: treasure hunt!
Pontification track
I also ran a BOF session (sessions with the emphasis on discussion rather than presentation) on the topic of offering paid services - not because I have any groundbreaking insight, but to spark a collective conversation, “warm up the place” for the continuation of such discussions, and for the overall acceptance of such topics. Still, the room (50-60 seats?) was full. Many participants contributed to the discussion by sharing their knowledge about the situations in other countries: Greece, Romania, Germany, Netherlands.
From them I heard that some countries started to assure the immutability of invoices - with varying technical excellence, but with a sense that this is the future.
I also heard about a standard for bank payment via QR code.
I’ve made the slides available (odp, pdf), to certify that there’s nothing interesting.
Job Corner
I used to say after FOSDEM 2024 that Job Corner is my favourite FOSDEM track, and it was true because I actually got a couple of contracting opportunities from it (and one actual contract), plus one more contract from befriending someone during FOSDEM volunteering. I think Job Corner at FOSDEM is great thing - that it’s there and that it’s a corner, not taking over much space and not allowing live recruitment.
But this year there was really not much. And unfortunately the only couple vacancies relevant to me were from companies which I have applied long ago and which weren’t interested.
Lilka
For me it was also an opportune moment to promote the LILKA open hardware project from Ukraine. I showed off my Lilka around, offering the interested people to play games on it and telling what it is, and placing stickers around. A few people got it from me, so Lilkas have dispersed to a bunch countries, yay! Some of the aforementioned educators got interested, so it might pop up in interesting public contexts later.
I still have more assembly kits, so if you are interested, read up and contact me!
Food
Yeah.
Number one box I ticked: eat some Martino with dark bread rolls. None of this goodness is available in the England.
Until next time
When FOSDEM was officially over, and we walked out of Jansen auditorium after the closing keynote, my kid excitedly shouted - “I don’t want to leave FOSDEM! I want FOSDEM to continue forever! I want it to be at least 90 days next time!”
But of course, you can’t stay at FOSDEM forever - it’s not the place, it’s the kind and wise people who make this miracle. And these people are going to go back to their places, hopefully to come again in a year. And there will be new nice people. So, let’s be patient for the next FOSDEM.
