fosdem 2024 🗺

So I made it to fosdem for the fourth time. I never wrote anything about the first and second time as I remember but I made a little post on LinkedIn last time I went in 2020. It hasn’t changed much. It is still this chaotic, organic, wild and beautiful event that can send you in all kinds of directions. You have a plan when you get there. You must have since there are 800ish talks to choose from. But the plan will be abandoned. It is of course possible to sit down in one of the main rooms and get a decent single track conference but here you can really tailor the conference after your own needs and interests. You also have to be flexible because your plans will change. Who would have known that the Railways and Open Transport devroom were gonna be that popular. I tried to get in twice without success sending me instead in the direction of lunch or to another talk (that I would have missed otherwise). In the end I attended 15 talks on a wide variety of topics. More on most of them after this great list of advice.

So some advice if you go next year:

make some plans in advance - use one of the apps for this. I used the fosdem companion for android which is exactly what I need.
change the plans as the map stops corresponding to the territory
be prepared to stand in lines for food and beverages
if you really want to see a certain talk make sure to be in that room for the talk before
you can always retreat to janson when in doubt

I started Saturday with The State of OpenJDK. This was mostly about how the process of getting new versions of Java out these days work. I would have needed more about new features in the language but this was not the talk about that.

CATS: The Climate Aware Task Scheduler was a talk about an interesting scheduler that uses information about energy consumption in order to run heavy jobs at certain times. My previous employer could potentially use this.

Then the obligatory GPL talk Copyleft and the GPL …. This is of course a sad story. GPL licensed software is misused byt corporations and it is next to impossible to do anything about it. My sidenote: the nice and bright ideas about free and open software does not fit nicely with capitalism. The system would need to enforce openness in order for this to work. Individual open source software maintainers can not really do this.

There is a ruby devroom although ruby is getting out of fashion. I bet there are quite a few installations out there though. No problems getting into this room though. The first talk I attended here was called The best case scenario and was about the new pattern matching feature used in case statements in Ruby nowadays. (The name case is a bit weird to be honest. It is case-when in Ruby while in Java it is switch-case instead. Which makes more sense to me.) Pattern matching has not made it into function calls yet. And given the OO nature of Ruby it may not be the way to go perhaps.

The next talk was about a developer going back to doing most of the front end in Rails coming from a split experience with double stacks using React for the front end and Rails for the back end. A front-end journey back to Rails With all that comes with that. More expertise needed, duplication of logic and so on. This talk made me happy. I have nothing much against web frameworks for the browser but they are often quite overloaded. Last time I checked React comes with some 3000 libraries. Now Rails is also a magicians toolbox. It is optimized for developer speed but not that much for maintaining larger chunks of code. Still I thooght this was a nice move. Some of the old tech is clearly still useful. Me? If I do something myself I spin up sinatra and sprinkle it a bit with some javascripts. That is developer speed and maintainability in one place. For smaller projects though….

What comes after Unix was the topic of One way forward: finding a path to what comes after Unix. I didn’t know of Plan 9 before. When the unix folks at Bell Labs was about to make Unix 11 they instead decided to abandon backwards compatibility and make something new. This never materialized to something useful. The speaker seems to argue that this may be a basis for a future Unix replacement but I didn’t find it convincing. But I need more knowledge in the topic to have an opinion really.

At this point I was getting tired and the next two talks I only remember schematicly. It was Learning from disaster response teams to save the internet - an interesting take on learning from disaster response teams in our work to make the internet more open and free. And the other one was Magic and Software - at this point I was too tired to pay attention so I didn’t get the point and left a bit early insearch for tartare and wine.

The second day started with Daniel Stenberg - Mr Curl - arguing that You too could have made curl!. It is just a matter of putting in the time. I’m pretty sure he has some extra skills going for him. I - for example - can not put in 2 hours of extra work in the evening as Daniel says he does continuously. Even now when he is getting paid to work on curl in the days he puts in 2 hours every evening adding it up to 10 hours a day. I guess it must be a relaxing thing for him to do when us normal people try to sleep or perhaps play some games or watch TV instead.

Some less rememberable talks around lunch led up to a music slash audio theme. First out Live coding music with MicroBlocks and microcontrollers.. Bernat Romagosa - a former musician that has made a come back programming music using MicroBlocks. MicroBlocks is a tool like scratch where you program visually using blocks of code in a GUI made for this. So apparently you can hook up microcontrollers like Arduino or similar that in turn can send MIDI to a synthesizer making it possible to live code music from this environment. It was a pretty cool demo and the sky is the limit here. I kinda like the SonicPI approach a bit more since it is code in text form. This is likely because I am an old programmer….

Then PipeWire State of the Union - this replacement for Jack and whatsitcalled that never seems to work properly. Perhaps I have already been using it since audio on my last machine actually has been working fine.

And yet another talk about Generating music with Open tools, APIs, and NO AI!. Here Steven Goodwin presented an algorithmic approach to coding music. Examples in Javascript. It is all there in the browser - the possibility to generate music programmatically. He also gave example of some other platforms that can be used to live code music. I may dig deeper into this in the future - it is a topic I have been interested in for quite some time.

The last talk I attended was Version control post-Git. Yep - the git model is not easy to understand. I have spent quite some time helping people understand what to do when things aren’t as expected in Git. Pierre-Étienne Meunier had some mathematical ideas about how merges and such could be more intutitive. It didn’t convince me but I wouldn’t mind seeing something replace Git in the future. As Pierre said in the beginning: what if non-tech people could actually use and understand version control. That would be amazing. Almost mazin!

Over and out and see you next year!

written by fredrik at 2024-02-05