My first FOSDEM experience

1. My first
experience

2. About FOSDEM

3. Numbers
●
5000+ attendees
●
512 lectures
●
23 rooms / devrooms
●
6 buildings

4. Event Structure
1.Keynotes (eg. NSA operation ORCHESTRA: Annual Status
Report)
2.Main tracks (IPv6, Mail, Mathematics, Hardware, etc.)
3.Developer rooms (Ada, BSD, Go, NoSQL, MySQL, etc)
4.Lightning talks (eg. Why You Should be an Open Source
Project)
5.Certification exams (BSDCG, LPI)

5. Main keynotes
How we found a million style and
grammar errors in the English
Wikipedia & how to fix them
●
LanguageTool
●
Java
●
20.000 Wikipedia articles = 37.000 errors
●
4,3 mil articles = 1,1 mil errors

6. Main keynotes
NSA operation ORCHESTRA –
Anual Status Report
●
Ficticious NSA briefing
●
Parody
●
80's / 90's songs

7. Main keynotes
Software Archaeology for Beginners
●
●
Navigating culture
Understanding open source communities and how to
become part of one
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Spelunking legacy code bases
●
Reverse documentation
●
Tests, testing, and statistics
●
Modeling, profiling, and tracing
●
Avoiding curses, rolling boulders, and snakes

8. Main tracks
Tracing and debugging
●
Linux tracing with LTTng
●
Making the Linux Kernel better (without coding)
●
Your Application versus GDB
●
●
Who ate my battery? (why free and open source
systems are solving the problem of excessive
energy consumption)
A simple Energy-Aware Computing Framework

9. Main tracks
Memory and storage
●
●
●
What's New in OpenLDAP
Persistent Memory (changing the Way We
Store Data)
Concurrent Programming Made Simple (the
(r)evolution of Transactional Memory)

10. Main tracks
IPv6
●
●
●
The FOSDEM network (what is NAT64 and
DNS64; and why should you care?)
No more IPv4 (impact on applications and
measuring IPv6 deployment)
Using RIPE Atlas API for measuring IPv6
Reachability

11. Main tracks
Mail
●
●
●
Dovecot's way of scaling to millions of users
Postfix open source mail server - lessons
learned and recent developments
Mailpile

12. Main tracks
Mathematics
●
●
An Introduction to Sage
Calc: GPU enabling a spreadsheet (LibreOffice
Calc - now available on your GPU)

13. Main tracks
Hardware
●
●
●
OpTiMSoC (build Your Own System-on-Chip!)
ARM: Allwinner sunxi SoC's and the community
behind it (the most opensource (friendly) SoC!)
Power management: a system wide challenge

14. Main tracks
Miscellaneous
●
●
●
●
F-Droid (free Software app distribution for Android)
HTML5 Video Part Deux (new Opportunities and new
Challenges)
The Wikipedia stack (an insider's look at the free
encyclopedia's code that anyone can clone, branch &
commit)
MirageOS: compiling functional library operating systems

15. Main tracks
Security
●
●
USE OTR or how we learned to start worrying
and love cryptography
Capsicum (practical capabilities for UNIX)

16. Developer Rooms
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Ada
●
Automotive development
●
BSD
●
Configuration management
●
Desktops
●
Distributions
●
Embedded
●
Energy-efficient computing
●
Game development
●
Go
●
Graph processing

17. Developer Rooms
●
Graphics
●
HPC and computational science
●
Internet of things
●
Java
●
JavaScript
●
LLVM
●
Legal and policy issues
●
Microkernel-based operating systems
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Mozilla
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MySQL
●
NoSQL

18. Developer Rooms
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Open document editors
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Perl
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PostgreSQL
●
Python
●
Smalltalk
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Software defined radio
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Testing and automation
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Valgrind
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Virtualisation and IaaS
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Wikis
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Wine

19. Lightning talks
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39 talks
●
max 15 minutes
●
variety of topics
●
300 people auditorium
●
tech / non-tech speakers

20. Certification exams
BSDCG
●
BSDCG Exam Session
LPI (Linux Professional Institute)
●
LPI Exam Session

21. Do's
●
Try to stick 1 – 2 tracks
●
Get accomodation early
●
Show up early (really early!)
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Buy stuff
●
Buy books
●
Bring food with you
●
Visit Brussels

22. Don't
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Use propietary software (at the event)
●
Expect to find a seat
●
Use like 2-3 chairs
●
●
Expect to attend all lectures (or to ones you
planned to see)
Stay if you don't like the lecture

23. Q&A