Last weekend I was in Brussels for FOSDEM, a super awesome conference about free and open source software. Since my first year, three years ago, a few things have changed. This year I went as a speaker and I brought with me a talk about my experience writing Teleport, my first GTK+ application. I really hope I could motivate somebody to start their own project. Also, in the past year my relationship to free software has changed, from just being a user and advocate to an active contributor (primarily to the GNOME Project).
I stayed in Brussels an entire week to save some money on the travel costs and visit Brussels. I ended up staying inside most of the time though, not only to escape the cold and rainy weather, but also because I get super motivated at conferences to work on projects. I mostly worked on the implementation of the redesign of the background settings panel for GNOME, and I really hope we can still get it into GNOME 3.28 (fingers crossed!). In order to build the background panel I had to use jhbuild for the first time, and I had to learn it quickly because I had to finish the patch. So I spent a lot of time getting jhbuild running, while already preparing the talk in my head and going to social dinners and beer events, which was a bit much at times 😉
On Sunday I helped out at the GNOME booth. Luckily in the beginning there where not too many people, most likely they had a hard time getting up after the GNOME beer event the night before 😀
Therefore I had time to get comfortable at the booth and to learn what I needed to do.
As my talk got closer I got more and more nervous, but at least the previous days I was really calm about it. My talk was at 4 pm on Sunday in the Open Source Design devroom. It went well, except for a pretty bad case of the demo effect: The demo didn’t work on the first try, then my touchpad suddenly stopped working, and the entire time the projector was set at a resolution that cut off part of the slides :/
The most important thing I learned this year at FOSDEM (tip for all FOSDEM attendees) was to buy a “MOBIB Basic” card for 5 Euros and charge it with “10 journeys JUMP”s. This is much cheaper than buying single journey tickets, and it can even be used by more than one person at the same time.
All in all I really loved the event. I made a lot of new experiences, met new people and had interesting conversations. I’m already excited to come back to Brussels next year!
