"FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels."

Fosdem 2023 Logo

It was organized on the 4th & 5th February. Sadly, due to scheduling issue, I was unable to make it to the event on location itself and therefore had to view the talks from the online platform, which does not require registration, yeah!

After the event, once all the talks had been uploaded I started digesting available talks (bi)-weekly. There are a lot of talks available on the FOSDEM website which you can find here. All the previous years, talks have also been archived, so a very big library of technical content.

As my interest are primarily, security and software development, there where several interesting talks and there is one I want to mention because I find it particularly interesting.

  • "Using Rust for your network management tools!"
    • "Let the crabs control the packets!"
  • "Fedora Asahi"
    • "Fedora for Apple Silicon"
  • "How we’re making Matrix go voom"
  • And more

The last talk, I find the most interesting. It covers about how they achieved increasing the performance of the popular Matrix protocol.

Apparently, the live streaming of all the talks uses the Matrix protocol. They have an article about it from 2 years ago as this was the way they organized the event during the COVID period and it is still being used this year!

A lot of the talks make use of the Rust programming language. Seeing the wider use of the programming language, the more motivation that has given me to continue to learn language.

Conclusion

I would definitely be interested in attending the next FOSDEM on location, and being better prepared. Because of the amount of very interesting talks over lapping, I would recommend having a set of talks and backups you would like to attend before hand. You always have the option to watch some of the talks later on, as I did.