Preparing foss-north 2020

Next year’s foss-north will take place March 29 – 31, with the training day on April 1. Preparations are under way, and now we need your participation to make this event as great as the past years.

The preparations are under way and we’ve opened the Call for Papers. We truly believe that we bring together the best audience with the best speakers. Being a part of this is a great experience, so make sure to get your talk proposal submitted.

Another part of the foss-north experience is the community day. The day before the actual conference, a large set of community groups arrange workshops, hackatons, dev sprints, even mini conferences. This year we’ve already confirmed the participation of KDE, FreeBSD, and “something embedded” arranged by Endian (last year they did a full day workshop on the Zephyr Project).

If you want to be a part of the community day – don’t hesitate to reach out to info@foss-north.se. We help with a venue, food, and promotion. All you need to have is a cause!

In addition to this we are, of course, on the look out for sponsors. If you want to support us, or even take part in the conference with a booth, please join our Call for Sponsors. Make sure to tell your employer that they should sponsor – all sponsor packages include free tickets, so that way you can both participate in the event, and help us making this possible.

Between all of this we’re also working on the infrastructure. I’d like to extend a big thanks to Magnus Hagander from Postgresql. He is helping the migration to their pgeu-system system. This will give us a single system integrating the features we need – tickets, sponsors, scheduling, accounting. So no more Google Forms, Eventbrite, and manual coordination of systems. If you like css, html, and such, you’re more than welcome to help. Some pages still has rough edges.

Long story short: join us at foss-north 2020 – it will be fun! Take the opportunity to see Gothenburg end of March in 2020.

Advent of Code 2019

My work does not involve that much coding any more. I probably spend more time doing email, attending meetings, and preparing presentations than anything else these days. Still, my fingers itch if I don’t get to write some code now and then.

This has resulted in small apps such as Mattemonster, where I pushed myself to get it into a presentable state so that I could publish it to Google Play. Any one with kids starting with maths should try the app – my son loves it!

It also results in me doing the Advent of Code for a third time in a row. It is a nice exercise in problem solving, basic data structures, and algorithms – something that I have way too few excuses to exercise with. I’m still frustrated with day 15 from last year. I also remember day 16 fondly.

This year I considered doing the AoC in Rust, to learn. But I ended up with Python to save time instead.

Tech Day by Init

Last Thursday I visited Tech Day by Init and had the opportunity to talk about a topic close to my heart. I decided to do a talk about Open Source Anti-Patterns (you can find the slides over at Kuro Studio).

It is always fun visiting TDBI (it is my third year speaking). The audience is very well read up on the topics and the questions are always good. Also, I got a high five from a guy for my speech during the beer event ;-)