This was FOSDEM 2022

For the second year now FOSDEM hasn’t been run as an in-person event, filling the university campus in Brussels, but instead as an online-only event with lots of chat rooms, recordings, and live-streams. As with last year, the big advantage was that “Room full” signs were only used as jokes by the organisers. Sadly, being remote also meant that attendees had to organise their Belgian beer and waffles on their own. On that front I failed miserably this year, having neither any Belgian beer left nor any waffles, crepes, or at least fries at home.

Luckily, the event itself was far better organised! This year, I spent pretty much all of my time in the Go, Matrix, and PostgreSQL dev rooms, skipping the legal and community tracks completely this time around. I don’t think I had any really favourite talks but I immensely enjoyed the following:

• JSON in PostgreSQL - Learning with a case study
• Automatically refresh materialized views in PostgreSQL
• Lesser Known PostgreSQL Features
• Fun with Finite Automata
• OpenTelemetry and CI/CD
• A practical guide to CUE: patterns for everyday use
• Destructuring Frontend monoliths with MicroFrontends
• The Matrix State of the Union

Some of these I want/will need to watch again and there are also tons of others that are still on my to-watch list. Now I just have to wait for them to be processed and available.

I want to highlight one aspect of this year’s FOSDEM, though: The Go dev room had asked their speakers to record a short video showing the audience where they were living. I absolutely love this idea as it makes the speaker so much more tangible and relatable, and not just someone in a chat that answers some questions people might have about a talk they had recorded in advance!

While I’m talking about the chat, I have to say that Matrix performed really well again! Especially the whole integration of being able to watch the stream right within the chat using widgets felt great! Even when we eventually return to an in-person FOSDEM, I really hope that the matrix.fosdem.org will stay around!

That being said: Please let there be a “real” FOSDEM in 2023!