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fosdem summary
It's been just over a week since FOSDEM ended and it was even more hectic than we imagined. Thousands of open source developers across dozens of rooms and speakers and lots of delicious waffles. I'm still in awe that this is a completely volunteer organised event and that everything appeared to run smoothly. Especially, since this has to be the only conference I've been at where the wifi was usable (and ubiquitous).
The most interesting aspect was how crowded some of the rooms became and how quickly. For example, the configuration management track was pretty much full throughout the day with a crowd of people trying to get in. I heard that the Mozilla track was equally busy as were some other devrooms. This may be in indication of relative popularity but also the sheer scale that this annual event has reached. It may be outgrowing ULB. Thankfully, videos will be available this year so I hope I can catchup up with the sessions I couldn't get to! One that I was particularly interested in is the Xen/ARM talk in the Automotive track. Since cars are now getting smarter and Xen works on embedded devices it would be an excellent use case for Mirage to ensure that the software running in vehicles is safe and does only what it's supposed to. There were many other Xen talks too and you catchup with them on the Xen blog.
The Mail track talks were crowded and during the postfix talk we were treated to an interesting review of spam around the globe, which was followed up by the Mailpile team announcing their alpha release on stage! The Internet of Things devroom had a number of interesting talks but there need to be more people thinking about the underlying infrastructure needs before we can begin building resilient, decentralised networks.
For the Mirage talk, Mort and Anil gave a great demo by building unikernels on stage to show the process in action. They continued the demos at the Xen stall to a number of people including some surprisingly young FOSDEM attendees. We'll soon be moving our personal websites to become self-hosted unikernels, and from there we can build out more of the Nymote toolstack.
We've captured some of the interesting tweets and pictures below and hopefully next year we'll be speaking at FOSDEM about how we're using the Nymote toolstack.