FOSDEM 2013

Well, that’s another FOSDEM over with. In general this year seemed the same as the last couple of years but slightly bigger than usual (although it seems that way every year). The (newish) K building was in full swing with dozens of project stalls and dev rooms. The usual suspects - virtualisation / cloud, configuration management and MySQL rooms had nearly as many people trying to get in to the rooms as they did sitting down.

I think some of the main dev rooms have reached the level of popularity that forces you to either arrive early, get a seat and not move for the rest of the day or accept a very high level of probability that you won’t get to see the talks you want. I know a few of us had trouble cherry picking sessions across tracks - which obviously means we have excellent taste in topics. I wonder if having the same talks on both days would make it easier to move around as a visitor - you’d attempt to catch it the first time and if that fails, come back tomorrow. I realise however that this puts even more of a burden on speakers that graciously give their own time in both the preparation and performing of their talks. It does seem that scaling the rooms is the problem of the day once again.

I’d like to say a big thank you to all the organisers, speakers and other attendees for making it another enjoyable couple of days. See you next year.