Over the last weekend I had the pleasure to participate in the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting – aka FOSDEM – in Brussels, which is an annual conference for open source projects and their enthusiastic communities. It’s not only fascinating to listen to scheduled talks, but also to meet fellows again who I haven’t seen for mostly a year or even longer.
As every year I have spent a bit of my time before the event to prepare a schedule including interesting talks and other organizational stuff. But as it has been turned out again, setting up a schedule for talks is useless for me, because I would sit most of the time in the Mozilla DevRoom anyway. There are way too many interesting presentations and discussions that it is hard for me to leave.
This year some bits were different. Given my cold I was not able to participate in the Beer Event in the Delirium Cafe. It’s usually the perfect initial come together of this conference to greet people and have the first conversations. I kinda missed it, but the remaining work for this week did a good job in not letting me think about if for so long. The other news we noticed with the arrival at the campus of the University Solbosch. Surprisingly the locations have been modified a bit to give everyone more space. The biggest change definitely was the move of the booths to another building, which wasn’t that close to the rest of the areas of interest. So I headed over only once to check our Mozilla booth. IMO we haven’t had such a great location this time but given by our staff a lot of people stopped by already. While checking the other booths I also found the one of the Jenkins project, where Kohsuke Kawaguchi – the creator of Jenkins (formerly Hudson) – was able to help me with all of my questions. I call this a success – thanks Kohsuke!
As my personal highlight I had an own talk about Continuous Integration with Mozmill scheduled on Sunday at noon. It went pretty well and I got some positive feedback. If you wasn’t able to make it, you can check my slides here:
The most impressive conversation and follow-up work happened definitely with the guys from the Mozilla Add-on SDK project. Starting from my quick question about a foreseeable support for Thunderbird, it ended-up in a lot of discussions and a final hacking session at Sunday afternoon, which I sadly wasn’t able to attend. So I’m absolutely interested in the results. Oh, and while traveling back home I have spent about an hour to contribute my first patch to the project, which will let the builder add contributor names to the extensions install.rdf file.
All in all it was a stunning weekend and I hope to be able to attend it next year again. So a big thanks to Benoit and the Belgian community for taking care of the organization!