FOSDEM 2024, from my perspective
Hi there, it’s been a while! I hadn’t time to take care of my blog these days but I have so many ideas to write about! I will start with the FOSDEM conference 🙂
It’s my first time to this conference, FOSDEM is a 2 days conference about free open source software, the conference is also free, run by volunteers, same as open source. It takes place in Brussels, Belgium this year. You can learn more on the website.
I have been there with the Django Accessibility Team and with some friends from the Wagtail team. It’s always more fun when you do a conference with friends!
Personally, I liked the conference, I guess there might be also the hype of the first time conference here. Compared to other conference I have been, you have many tracks (also called Devroom) so it can be hard to find your way at the beginning but you finally manage your way (or follow some people who are going to the same talk).
I have seen few accessibility talks and some I wanted to see out of curiosity. I also support my friend Sage Abdullah who was giving a talk too ❤️
The talks I have been to:
- Keynote, Outreachy, 1000 interns
- Web Accessibility and Environmental Sustainability and with Popular CMS
- Web-accessibility for open-source privacy & security tools
- Power profiling my entire house with the Firefox Profiler
- Firefox power profiling: a powerful visualization of web sustainability
- Modern editing experiences you can build in your CMS
It’s also quite funny, I have done mostly conferences in full english and since I’m french, I wasn’t sure each time if I should speak french or english, and sometimes I discovered after talking in english to someone, this person was actually speaking french to someone else hahaha.
The talks I wanted to see was mostly on Sunday so I talked a lot to people in Saturday and discovering the various stands there were. It was really diverse, Mastodon, Mozilla, Postgresql, Open design collective, OpenSSL, Debian, even XMPP!
I made new friends, of course, see old friends, and see some people I know their name but never see them in real so it’s quite nice.
The thing I really like was the BoF, which mean Both of Feather, it happens most of the time after a specific talk, and it’s a good opportunity to discuss with people from a talk or just people involved in a specific track (for example python or accessibility).
I have been to the Outreachy one and another one on accessibility. It was really interesting to talk with people, ask questions and learn some resources from other people. I would love to see happening the resource about the WCAG for backend developers we were talking about in accessibility BoF and have a dedicated track for accessibility.
As the DSF board member, the Outreachy program seems to be interesting to have for Django at some point. I also find disturbing to see so many people no knowing Django at all, I think it would be nice to have something representing Django next year. Nevertheless, we did find some people using Django or knowing Django and found amazing to see the full accessibility team at the event. We were thanks for our work on accessibility, this is so priceless to have feedback on that and we love that.
Sage represent CMS with python with his talk, and a lot of people in the room was only doing PHP, so it was nice to see the appreciation of other people of the work done in another language for quite same purpose in content management system.
Unfortunately, I didn't have time to see Cheuk's talk or talk from the Python Devroom but I'm glad I saw her at least.
Some of them were totally full, especially when it's a talk given by Daniel Stenberg or Scott Chacon but I enjoyed watch them online:
I plan to be there next year, and I hope to see you there or have your support from wherever you are!