Since I write these blog posts every year, it’s getting harder and harder to come up with an introduction 😅 Traveling to Brussels for FOSDEM each year is one of my highlights every year but this time everything was even better!
The conference
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room right away: There was sun and blue sky throughout the conference! I’ve been going to FOSDEM for about 10 years now and I’ve never seen that before. Usually it’s at least drizzling, sometimes snowing, sometimes raining, always gloomy. Getting something from the food trucks was always combined with getting wet. Not so this time and I think everyone absolutely loved it! At least judging by the amount of people hanging out in the sunny places 😀
Despite the nice weather, the hallways and rooms were as packed as usual! Unfortunately, there were also lots of folks running around without masks that should have had them. While I really loved the talks in the Social Web devroom, I just had to eventually leave. At least this allowed me to enjoy the weather even more and just want wander around and enjoy the scenery. I also watched some talks from the cafeteria while enjoying a snack 😅
I didn’t saw a lot of talks but I definitely plan to watch the rest of the Social Web devroom and some sessions from the Go, Rust, and PostgreSQL tracks! “From Queries to Pints” was just a great appetizer!
As always, it was just an awesome event! Big thanks to the organisers for making it happen again and thanks for avoiding a controversy around a potential Jack Dorsey keynote 😅
The side events
This year we only went to the GitHub Maintainers Social Event on Sunday evening. We wanted to have a slightly more relaxed trip this year compared to last year but the “GitHub party” is just a fix-point. Once again hosted in Scott’s Bar there were tons of people from all over the OSS landscape there. The hexcolor-matching of people introduced me this time for instance to some Homebrew folks 😄 It was just (as always) a great evening!
Everything else
We once again stayed at the Moxy Brussels City Center and really enjoyed it. After a long evening on Sunday we even tried the breakfast on Monday morning and will definitely have it again in the future.
Only a 5-minutes walk away from our hotel we found an EXKi restaurant. While we originally only wanted to have a small snack there we stayed for multiple hours! It was just comfortable and we had window seats in in the first flow allowing us to observe the madness that is the Chaussée d’Ixelles during the busy hours. Combined with good sandwiches, mousse au chocolate, and local beer it was the right thing after getting up at 04:00 to catch a flight 😊
After dinner on Friday we went to Brussels Beer Project (Dansaert) to try something different. While the back room was a bit on the chilly side, the beer was very tasty and they also had some Mexican bar food. On Saturday we noticed that there was also another one closer to our hotel which we will probably try next year! Right on the other side of the street we also found the Natural Caffè . The pastries there looked just amazing and the Chai Latte was good!
Chocolate shopping is definitely done cheaper in the city and not at the airport. We also tried pralines by Leonidas this year and so far are really enjoying them at home!
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