This year marks the 20th birthday of FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting. Held annually on the first weekend of February at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium, it’s an event I’d only recently discovered and decided to attend with a friend.

I had the pleasure of sitting in on some fascinating talks, although time constraints meant I couldn’t catch them all.

The standout sessions for me included:

• Applying Open Culture Practices across Distributed Teams
• Hacking Terraform for fun and profit
• HTTP/3 for everyone
• Continuous Delivery starts with Continuous Infrastructure
• Functional Programming with Go
• From a Pipeline to a Government Cloud
• Why open infrastructure matters
• Choosing the right deployment strategy
• How to measure Linux performance wrong
• Building a self healing system with SaltStack
• Infrastructure testing, it’s a real thing!
• Recognising Burnout

I wish I’d had more time to explore, particularly the Python room, given the event’s vast scope.

I highly recommend attending if you have the chance. It’s entirely free, and I certainly plan to return in coming years.