The only picture of me @ FOSDEM. With Christian Kellner/gicmo
FOSDEM is one of the biggest gatherings of open-source developers, enthusiasts, and contributors. This year's FOSDEM was a huge deal for me, as well for the neuro-sig. For the first time in FOSDEM, the Open Research Tools and Technologies devroom was participating, and we were also presenting NeuroFedora at FOSDEM for the first time. For those who don't know, NeuroFedora is an initiative to provide a ready-to-use open-source platform (based on Fedora) for neuroscience. Our work revolves around packaging, testing, and maintaining tools that are used in neuroscience research and development.
I traveled from Delhi, India. My flight got delayed and had to stay at the airport for a bit longer. But, it also gave me plenty of time to rehearse for my talk about NeuroFedora (wait for it :P). I reached Brussels at night and made it to our accommodation, Hotel Chambord, via the Brussels high-speed train. I checked into the hotel and met with Sumantro (my roomie for FOSDEM).
The next day, we woke up early, had some breakfast at the hotel (I just devoured on the cheese and coffee). Then we all (Zach, Mariana, Geoff, Sumantro) took an Uber to the venue: Universite Libre de Bruxelles. We all carried the goodies to the stall, where we all set it up. I had to leave early because the talk on NeuroFedora was early in the morning.
It was raining outside, and I was getting late to get to the devroom. I made a run through the rain to the opposite side of the campus to get to the devroom. By the time I reached the room, we both got quite wet, which also made my throat terrible, and I got a bit of cold. I quietly went inside the room, sat in a corner, trying to cover up my bouts of sneezes and cough. I was nervous as well, as it was my first talk, and I was not expecting such a crowd. People were actually forming lines outside the devroom, and it merely made me more nervous about the discussion.
There I sat, waiting for my turn to come. As I was called upon the stage, I was shaking. I struggled a bit to connect the projector to the laptop. I took a deep breath and started the talk. The talk finished in a flash for me. As I came near to the end of the discussion, my bad throat started acting up again, and I got into a bout of coughing furiously. I tried to stop it, but it was no avail. I coughed for a good minute or two, and then quickly finished the talk, and went to the questions. It was a good roller coaster ride for me, but overall I did great (as told by people who were listening to me) for a first-timer. I also met Christian Kellner (gicmo) from the neuro-sig. He was hiding in plain sight in the audience. I also got a chance to meet Jan Grewe, a friend of gicmo, and one of the speakers in the same devroom. Here is a link to the talk. Please do have a look. :D
Later on, we all went to have some of the Belgian fries and waffles from the food trucks. They were really amazing, and quite heavy for me as well. :P
Soon it was my time to volunteer at the Fedora booth. I went to the building and walked over to the booth. There were thousands of goodies available, from coffee cups to stickers to badges. At the booth, I met Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project Leader. At first, I observed him for a while, how he was interacting with the people, and asking them questions about Fedora (He really is a fantastic Fedora ~~salesman~~ advocate). I met quite a few exciting folks there as well. I met one of the GNOME devs (who showed his name in the about section of GNOME settings), and people from Weblate as well. There were plenty of open source enthusiasts present there, who were very happy to see their favorite orgs and meet the contributors as well.
Soon, it was evening, and Fedora contributors had planned a dinner. I had already agreed to a dinner/meet with the Open Research Tools and Technologies people and had to miss this one :(. I met Christian, again, where we planned to go to the venue together. We met Julia, Achilleas, and Michael as well. We went for dinner first, where we had some spaghetti/pasta. Later on, we tried some of the Belgian Beers, and that was one of the best parts of the whole experience. We all talked until night.
The next day was not as hectic but was more actually more fun. I woke up slightly late, hence had to travel to ULB alone. I was at the bus stop and met a few people who were going for FOSDEM as well. We all discussed our work and talked about a few orgs. When I arrived at the venue, I straightaway went to collect some swags from different orgs. Later on, I joined the distro devroom. It had a massive line, but I guess it was worth the wait. I attended a few talks about homebrew and systemd, and it's security features.
Soon I joined the booth again, where we met more people from the Fedora community. There was Petr, Ben, Jona, Vipul, Sayan, and lots more. I got in again with Matthew, and we pitched Fedora to the people. I also met a few people from RedHat, who were working on various other aspects of either Fedora or Red Hat :P.
Around evening, we all started packing up the stuff and organizing the trash. It marked the end of the FOSDEM 2020. I was also able to get some postcards from the VLC-cone-head-man and the GNU-sorcerer-wizard (I at least called them that).
Overall, FOSDEM was a great learning experience for me. I got to know about various new technologies floating around (Kubernetes, for example). I met a lot of great people who inspired me to keep contributing to the open-source world. The booth organizers <3 did a great job. A shout-out to Marie, Mariana, and Sumantro, for organizing the whole thing <3. A massive shoutout to the neuro-sig as well, who worked so hard in bringing NeuroFedora to life, and sending me to FOSDEM to produce it to the people. Thanks a lot for making FOSDEM such a fantastic conference. :D
The only picture of me @ FOSDEM. With Christian Kellner/gicmo