Last week of early birds!

This is the last week of early bird tickets for foss-north 2019. The program has not yet been set, so getting one of these tickets, you trust us to deliver a great conference – something that we’re very thankful for.

We do have some parts of the schedule fixed: the trainings and some initial speakers.

The trainings are open enrollment courses at a bargain price, where parts of the dividends goes to financing the conference. This year we have two great trainers: Michael Kerrisk of manpage and The Linux Programming Interface fame, and Chris Simmonds, the man behind the Mastering Embedded Linux Programming book and a trainer since more than 15 years. The trainings held are: Building and Using Shared Libraries on Linux and Fast Track to Embedded Linux. These are both one day courses held in a workshop format.

Browsing through the replies to the call for papers, I am convinced that the 2019 foss-north will be the best one this far – and the past three years have been great.

So, get your tickets while they are hot! ;-)

PS. If you want to help out – give me a ping at e8johan – gmail – com. We need a couple of helping hands during the event days to help make sure everything runs smoothly.


fosdem 2019

The first weekend of February means Belgium, Brussels and fosdem. To those of you who has not been there yet, it is a huge, chaotic, crowded, but also wonderful event.

But first I was met by a huge snow storm and the following chaos. :-)

I’ve been to fosdem a number of years now, and I was brave enough to take to the stage last year. In the early days, I spent most time in various dev rooms, either hacking myself or listening to talks. For me, fosdem has changed from this to more of a social event. I’ve spent hours talking the the K-building, made sure to meet people I’ve interacted with online for the first time, and generally hang out and enjoy the company of a lot of smart people.

Another side mission of mine this year was to do some foss-north promotion. As you might know, I’m organizing the foss-north event, and I had the opportunity to meet with both speakers and sponsors during fosdem (call for papers close in ~1.5weeks, just sayin’). I also took the opportunity to hang some flyers at the venue, so hopefully some people discovered the event that way.

As I pointed out earlier, the weather was not that great, but for a few moments on Sunday morning the sun peeked out between the clouds and you could almost feel a sense of spring in the air.

I did not attend that many talks this year, but I did really appreciate Jon maddog Hall‘s talk Fifty years of Unix and Linux advances.

After the event I took the opportunity to visit Brussels with some friends. I finally got around to visit Atomium. Such an amazing place! I love the mix of the 50’s architecture and the contemporary exhibitions in some of the spheres. This place was way better than I expected it to be.

So fosdem delivered again. Chaos, so many meetings with new people as well as old friends and acquaintances, great contents, and a generally great experience in Brussels. I’m already looking forward to next year’s event!