Majic

Well, I'm still a bit tired, relaxing at the hostel room, after the official closing of FOSDEM 2010 today. This has been the first conference of this type that I've attended, and it has been very interesting. Since I'm tired, I'll just mention some first impressions I had.

I've arrived on Friday afternoon, and managed to mingle around the Brussels a bit with sueastside from the Peragro Tempus project.

The city itself is a weird combination of architecture. Some gothic-style buildings pop-up from the mostly modern architecture (in glass etc). There's also some baroque architecture (or at least I think so, I'm not an expert) to spice up the whole thing. My impressions are a bit mixed. I like gothic architecture, but the whole mixing of styles kind of spoils the looks. It's a very clean city, though.

In the evening there was a beer event, and it was quite pleasant. I came to realisation that even after many drunk beers, all the geeks were still happy, there was no pushing, people kept saying sorry when they step on you etc. Very nice atmosphere. I also had a chance to meet some interesting people.

As for FOSDEM itself, the lectures I've visited were mostly interesting, but I managed to miss some of the things I wanted to visit during Saturday (day one). In particular I wanted to hear the talk about the use of XMPP and Jingle, as well as the one about Ganglia and OSSEC, but oh well... I also spent a lot of time passing the stands and making enquiries.

Day two was more fulfilling since I have figured out what I'd like to attend. I've also had some misses in those (I've expected more from some of the topics). Still, I managed to find out some interesting things, so it wasn't bad (except I failed to buy some O'Reilly books I wanted since they sold out).

I feel that FOSDEM might improve a bit when it comes down to covering some topics, and maybe extending the conference so that it'd be more interesting to system administrators as well when it comes down to lectures.

I planned out to stay another day after FOSDEM so that I could do some additional sight-seeing (and taking obligatory photos of the Brussels with my new/first camera).