A first-timer's experience of attending FOSDEM

I arrived early at the Université libre de Bruxelles campus, which is just south of Brussels city centre. The campus is reasonably big and it took me a little while to orientate myself. Thankfully, the maps on the FOSDEM website are pretty granular and made it relatively easy to find the building where the Geospatial track was being held.

My talk was at 12:50, but I wanted to catch the whole track so put myself in the front row. The Geospatial room has a capacity of about 75 people, and it quickly packed out with enthusiastic attendees.

The opening talk, 'MapTCHA, the open source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap', presented by Anna Zanchetta, was a particular highlight. It was a fascinating look at attempting to use CAPTCHAs to improve OpenStreetMap data, and the technical implementation details of making that happen.

Another talk I enjoyed was 'Connecting the Geospatial Dots with Raku' by Brian Duggan. It was partially an introduction to the Raku programming language (a spinoff language from Perl), but also an exploration of how it can be used for geospatial analysis.

It was then time for my talk, ‘Terra Draw: Drawing on all the web maps!’ For context, Terra Draw is an open source project for drawing on web maps. Overall, I felt the talk went well and that the audience was engaged and interested in the project. I had some good questions in the Q&A time afterwards, and then a few more informal questions during the speaker switchover.

After my talk and the following talks had finished, I had a bit of time to explore the stands, taking time to learn more about the Software Freedom Conservancy which is a non-profit organisation that helps promote, improve and defend free and open source software (FOSS).

Given the queues for the smaller room, I decided to head for some of the keynote rooms where there were plenty of spare seats.

I gained valuable information on open source maintenance from the 'Zephyr: Open Source Project Best Practices Over Time' talk. It looked at different best practices for maintaining a large-scale open source codebase with multiple vendors involved.

After this, I moved on to a panel in the Fontaine room discussing the implications of re-licensing open source projects. The title of the discussion was 'Forked Communities: Project Re-licensing and Community Impact', and it considered the results of the hard-forked spin-offs when that happens.

In the evening I went to a speakers’ dinner for the geospatial room. This gave me the chance to chat with some of the other speakers and organisers, and enjoy the quintessential Belgian dish of mussels and frites.

I decided to start day two in the JavaScript room, before moving to the funding dev room after lunch.

One highlight from the morning was a presentation by two engineers from Deno, Leo Kettmeir and Luca Casonat. Titled 'JSR: from private ownership to open governance', it touched on moving JSR (a new package manager for JavaScript which emphasises TypeScript support and compatibility across various JavaScript runtimes) to an open governance model. The aim of this is to bring the future of JavaScript package management into a more community-driven and democratic space.

Another talk I found thought-provoking was 'Privacy-first architecture: alternatives to GDPR popup and local-first'. Presented by Andrey Sitnik, it explored why privacy is important for end users of the web, and how local-first can be a useful pattern for preserving privacy with additional benefits such as performance.

The last talk I caught in the JavaScript track was 'Demystifying Temporal: A Deep Dive into JavaScript New Temporal API' by Aditi from Igalia. The talk went into detail about the pain points of the Date API for JavaScript developers. It explored how the Temporal proposal attempts to resolve the pain points by bringing in things like first-class support for all time zones and non-Gregorian calendars, wrapped up and presented in nice modern APIs for developers.

After some lunch (I went off campus to avoid the crowds at the food trucks) I saw one talk from the funding dev room called 'Funding FOSS together: Combining public and private efforts'. It was an interesting insight into the different approaches between public and private sector funding for open source software (OSS).

The last talk I was able to watch was 'Lessons learned Open Sourcing the UK's Covid Tracing App' by Terence Eden. This talk was particularly captivating as, having lived in the UK at the time of COVID, and being an open source developer, I remember opening the GitHub repository for the app when it became open source.

The talk contained many anecdotes of tough decisions that had to be made in short spaces of time, and the dynamics and implications of the press, politicians and also the general public speaking about open source.

After this, I sadly had to leave early to catch my flight home, but I left with a sense of having had a great experience and having learned a lot.

I would definitely recommend FOSDEM to anyone who is interested in open source software, and I hope to be back next year. Overall, I had a great time at FOSDEM. Having been to many conferences over my career, FOSDEM offers something unique with its scale and breadth of content, alongside its non-commercial nature. I would recommend the event to developers of any experience level as I think there is something for everyone.