Thursday 14 February 2019

FOSDEM 2019

I recently had the opportunity to attend FOSDEM. If you haven't heard of FOSDEM, it is a two-day conference held in the beautiful city of Brussels, Belgium. The goal is to promote free and open source software. FOSDEM brings together people from diverse FOSS projects. And unlike other open source conferences, FOSDEM is completely free to attend.

It was my first time attending FOSDEM and I was unsure of what to expect. And if I am being completely honest, I was a tad sceptical as to whether it would be worth travelling to Brussels all the way from Bangalore. I am glad that I was wrong. Along with attending some high-quality talks, I spent 3 wonderful days in the city of Brussels, visited the nearby city of Bruges and spent a couple of days at Amsterdam.

I met some very interesting people and talked to some very interesting projects. There were some very cool stands from some very popular projects like Apache and Mozilla. Being extremely popular, these were extremely crowded. I met some folks from the PostGraphile project, a really wonderful project that allows one to create a GraphQL API server instantly by pointing to an existing PostgreSQL. How cool is that! There were some guys who maintain the super impressive game 0AD. 0AD is a free and open source game like Age of Empires, only better. It's completely built by game developers all over the world. Imagine playing a strategy game written by yourself! There were some other popular projects too like GlusterFS by RedHat, a distributed open source file system. 

But the most interesting of all was the XMPP project. The XMPP project is aimed at building a set of open technologies for instant messaging, multi-party chat and a lot of other things. If one could send instant messages to other people, much like how we send emails now, without ever having to worry if the receiver is on a different email provider. So I could send a message over one of my messaging apps to a person on some other messaging app. The folks at XMPP were kind enough to answer the numerous ignorant questions that I asked.

I spent a lot of time in the open media dev-room. Dev-rooms are where people with a specific set of interests come together to talk about interesting projects in the domain. That is where I discovered GStreamer, an open source multimedia framework for building multimedia applications on top of it. There were interesting talks, with one in particular about using Rust to build multimedia applications. I also spoke there about combining OpenCV and CUDA to build video analysis tools. 

FOSDEM is a really special conference in that it is run by volunteers and donations alone. Brussels is a really nice place to visit, maybe February is not the best time. Here is a picture of ULB Solbosch, the venue.