After enjoying my visit previously in 2020 (see my previous posts FOSDEM 2020 and Brussels, Belgium, 2020), I decided to visit FOSDEM again now that it’s back up and running since 2023 after the pandemic. I had a lot of fun taking photos which I’ve posted here Brussels, Belgium, 2024.

FOSDEM is a Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting which is held annually on the first weekend of February at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium.

It was great to be back again and to get my hands on some Belgian beers. It’s impossible to see everything I want to as getting around the campus takes time, sometimes the rooms are physically full and all the sessions run in parallel and overlap.

With that said I was able to attend lots of good sessions. Below I’ve listed all the talks which were relevant and interesting to me, but you can see the full list of events at https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/events/.

General

• Will the first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) instance be free or open-source software?
• You too could have made curl!
• So you think you know Git
• Version control post-Git
• A simple caching service for your CI
• Testing Containers with Python and pytest
• Platform engineering for dummies
• Mind the gap: Building a cultural commitment to documentation maintenance
• A Lazy Developer’s Approach to Building Real-Time Web Applications
• Do you know YAML?
• Project websites that don’t suck
• Journey to an open source contribution
• FOSDEM infrastructure review
• Trusted Postgres Architect - Deploying Postgres with Infrastructure as Code

AI and Machine Learning

• An Introduction to Open Source AI
• Building Open Source Language Models
• AI for Developers: Treating Open Source AI as a Function
• Using code generated by AI: issues, misconceptions and solutions

APIs

• Introduction to OpenAPI

Collaboration and Content Management

• How to get rid of Confluence: Comparing Open Source Knowledgemanagent Systems

Containers

• DIY Private Container Registry
• Kubernetes Operators: Expanding Automation in Containerized Applications
• Composefs and containers
• Soft Reboot: keep your containers running while your image-based Linux host gets updated
• What’s new in Containerd 2.0!
• Zero-touch Infrastructure for Container Applications
• Modern Build Systems for Containers

Distributions

• The State of Enterprise Linux 2024
• Homebrew’s Evolution

DNS

• Let’s make people love domain names again

Docs

• Experimenting with AI and LLM to make docs searchable through a chat application

Go

• The state of Go
• Maintaining Go as a day job - a year later
• Dependency injection: a different way to structure a project
• Putting an end to Makefiles in go projects with GoReleaser
• Low code graphical apps with Go top to bottom!

Monitoring & Observability

• Unifying Observability: The Power of a Common Schema
• Linux load average and other silly metrics
• Fast, Cheap, DIY Monitoring with Open Source Analytics and Visualization
• What is CI/CD observability, and how to bring observability to CI/CD pipelines?
• Introducing Observability to an airline

Networking

• “Where the !?*! are the packets going?”
• Broom not included: curling the modern way
• Navigating the Networking Maze of Kubernetes: A Journey of Discovery, Confusion, and (Hopefully) Enlightenment

Python

• How to Use Private Data in Generative AI: End-to-End Solution for Retrieval Augmented Generation with CrateDB and LangChain
• Making Python safer than ever
• Match all things Python: Parsing structured content with Python’s new match statement

Testing & Continuous Delivery

• Streamlining Developer Experience: The Power of CI/CD Standardization and Interoperability
• Practical CI/CD Observability with OpenTelemetry

Virtualisation & Cloud Infrastructure

• Private clouds do not need to be legacy!
• Deploy Kubernetes… From Kubernetes: an overview of Cluster API
• Operating Kubernetes Across Hypervisors with Cluster API & GitOps
• AI-Driven Observability and Operations in Cloud-Edge Systems