FOSDEM

What can I say - FOSDEM was great! It was really good to meet up with some of the other developers from Gentoo, as well as listen to some of the amazing talks and buy a little merchandise. I have never managed to make it to a large conference before, so it was quite an experience being there.

I travelled down on the Eurostar with Louise, my fiancee. She had a nice enough time, despite not being very interested in computers. It was bitterly cold though, and I am afraid that Brussels is very expensive with little to see or do there. Luckily the conference had lots going off, and so more than compensated. I had quite a list of talks I wanted to go to anyway - starting with Richard Stallman’s.

Overall the talks were very good. I especially enjoyed Alan Cox’s talk about maintaining a stable kernel. He offered an amazingly cadid look into how he tries to maintain a stable kernel and some of the problems he faces. I also discovered some previously hidden features of KDevelop I had not seen before - as well as realising what a versatile programming environment it offers.

It was great to actually meet so many other developers in person, and we thoroughky enjoyed the developer meal on Saturday evening. I swapped GPG key signatures with quite a large number of the developers there - it will take me forever to sign and upload them all though. If anyone would like to see any of the photos I took then I have uploaded them to my gallery - I will add more of the images as I get time to scan them in.