This was my first Fosdem and I have to say I enjoyed the experience a lot, despite the freezing cold in Brussels last weekend :) The amount and quality of the talks was overwhelming and there were many parties all along the event. I loved Fosdem atmosphere. Now I understand why so many igalians say Fosdem is one of the best events of year.

My main goal in this Fosdem was to give a talk about LibrePlan. The talk was held on Sunday morning and it was scheduled in the Lighting Talk track. I was happy to introduce LibrePlan to so many people and answer some questions that arose after the talk. Thanks everybody for coming. If you couldn’t attend Fosdem this year and would like to know more about LibrePlan, checkout the slides and video online (not available yet).

Apart from giving the LibrePlan talk, I also attended some other talks. Fosdem features many tracks with many interesting talks happening at the same. That makes it really difficult to arrange a solid agenda with all the talks you’d like to see. Fortunately some of the tracks were fully recorded, and talks will be available online soon.

The event started with the traditional welcome speech at Janson room. Actually, Fosdem started the day before with the also traditional get-all-together meeting at Delirium Tremens :)

After the welcome speech I moved to the room holding the *Cloud *track. The room was next to Mozilla’s room, which was also holding some talks I was interested in. I ended up spending more time at Mozilla’s room that at any other room. I especially liked the talk ‘Hacking Gecko‘ by Bobby Holley. It was a great introduction to Gecko and how to start hacking on Firefox. Bobby has a deep knowledge on the subject, but he was also very confident and shown a lot of attitude. It was together with Bdale Garbee’s keynote the best talk I attended at Fosdem.

At the Mozilla track I also attended:

  • Developing Firefox in 2012: Add-ons, Jetpack, Github and more by Dietrich Ayala. Also great talk although Ayala was a bit chilly. It was good to see Ayala in person, I still remember when I was a student about to graduate and I sent him an email with regard his NuSoap library, one of the first implementations of Soap for PHP.
  • Hack the web by Jeff Griffiths and Matteo Ferretti it was a nice introduction to JetPack, the new mechanism for developing extensions for Firefox.
  • Howto: Extensions for Thunderbird by Jonathan Protzenko, it was an introduction on how to develop extensions for Thunderbird, with real examples. Developing extensions for Thunderbird has always being harder than for Firefox as there is much less documentation. Fortunately, Jetpack will arrive soon to Thunderbird.
  • The State of Firefox Mobile by Lucas Rocha and Chris Lord, it was a good summary of the challenges to make Firefox mobile (Fennec) faster. The talks was particularly focused on Fennec for Android. It was a nice talk and very humble, I cannot think of many corporations which will openly acknowledge their products last up to 30 seconds to boot. I guess the first step to overcoming limitations is to admit them.
  • Boot to Gecko and Web API by Chris Jones and Andreas Gal. Boot to Gecko is an operating system based in open web technologies. The idea is to provide a single open platform where developers can build new applications, instead of targeting three different native mobile platforms (iPhone, Android and Windows). It definitively looks like the way to go and it is good Mozilla is pushing for it, but convincing developers to drop successful platforms with very proved successful business models is going to be hard. In any case, Boot to Gecko is still in its infancy.

On Sunday I gave my talk about LibrePlan and later I was talking with some people interested in LibrePlan. I also got the chance to talk with Apostolos Bessas from Transifex. Transifex is a localization platform that makes localization of applications very easy. We are using it now for LibrePlan and we love it. It was nice to meet you all.

Then in the afternoon I stuck to the Dev track and attended the following talks:

  • The Apache Cassandra storage engine by Silvain Brisbaine. It was a good talk but it got very much in detail in certain topics to my taste. I’d have preferred a broader and more introductory talk.
  • From Dev to Devops by Carlos Sánchez. Before the talk I was completely ignorant about the devops movement. Actually I was not thinking of attending but Carlos López, fellow igalian, sat next to me and convinced me to stay. I knew Carlos Sánchez from his work maintaining Maven and also because he studied at University of Coruña and is a friend of some Igalians. He gave an explanatory talk about what the devops movement is about. To put it in one line, devops is basically applying the principles of agile to system operations. Imaging using developing tools like Maven, Hudson, etc for system operations. The term is a combination of development + operations. After an introduction to the devops principles, he introduced Puppet, a declarative language for managing system operations.

Fosdem closed with a fascinating keynote by Bdale Garbee. Last year Fosdem brought a vision called FreedomBox. Everyday more and more of our lives is being uploaded online, while we trust our communications and data on third party applications. FreedomBox is about taking back the control of our own data and build federated networks that can communicate together knowing that our data won’t be compromised or abused by any corporation or public administration. Bdale Garbee gave a summary of all the progress made during last year in the FreedomBox project. It was good to see that a foundation has been set,  groups have been structured and things are rolling. However, there’s still much left to do. FreedomBox is a big challenge. I don’t know if it will be successful or even if it will ever be implemented one day, but I’m sure something will come out of FreedomBox. Progress and innovation happens when there are constraints and challenges to overcome, and the FreedomBox project is full of them.

Unfortunately due to the tight schedule I couldn’t attend to some of the talks by other Igalians. There were quite a few. API had a talk about the Status of accessibility on Gnome 3.4. Guillaume talked about Hacking in the real world, with a room fully packed of curious people. Mario and Philippe did a review of the latest progress and future roadmap of WebkitGTK+ at WebkitGTK+ status and roadmap to Webkit2. Xan López closed the Cross-desktop track with Web Applications in Gnome, featuring a live-demo of Angry Birds that really put the crowd in his pocket.

In summary, Fosdem was great. I’m looking forward to attending next year, with even more fellow igalians if possible. This year we were 14 in total, not bad. By the way, beer was terrific but I guess I don’t need to say it 😉