foss-north – the count down

Flashback time! At last year’s foss-north we had a great talk by the Zifra team. They spoke about their encryption solution, enabling journalists and other people having to handle sensitive data to make their digital information inaccessible while in an exposed location. You can see the recording right here (you might have to click the link if your aggregator hides YouTube contents).

foss-north strives to gather the best speakers, the best audience at the best location (Gothenburg) for one day each year. This year the event takes place on April 23 – get your tickets here!

It is just 4 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.

foss-north – the count down

Every year we try to seed the foss-north event with a set of key speakers. This year, one of our seed speakers is Patricia Aas from the Vivaldi Browser. She will be speaking about isolating GPU access in its own process.

“Chromium’s process architecture has graphics access restricted to a separate GPU-process. There are several reasons why this could make sense, three common ones are: Security, Robustness and Dependency Separation.

GPU access restricted to a single process requires an efficient framework for communication over IPC from the other processes, and most likely a framework for composition of surfaces. This talk describes both the possible motivations for this kind of architecture and Chromium’s solution for the IPC framework. We will demonstrate how a multiprocess program can compose into a single window on Linux.”

It is just 5 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.

foss-north – the count down

Every year we try to seed the foss-north event with a set of key speakers. This year, one of our seed speakers is Carsten Munk known from Jolla, libhybris, Meego, Maemo and more. This year he will speak about his new endevour Zipper – bringing blockchain technology to mobile devices.

“Zipper is an Ethereum based mobile platform which brings blockchain based services to our smartphones in one seamless and user-controlled experience.

At first, Zipper provides everyday smartphone users an easy and safe way to manage their identity and private keys. This makes it possible for anyone to access blockchain based services out-of-the-box in an easy and intuitive way – just like Apple’s services on iOS today – while being in full control of their identity, transactions and data. Zipper works in an isolated compartment in Android and Sailfish OS smartphones, making Zipper and its wallet secure while still easily accessible.”

It is just 6 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.

foss-north – the count down

Flashback time! At last year’s foss-north we had a great talk by Chris Lamb about reproducible builds. You can see the recording right here (you might have to click the link if your aggregator hides YouTube contents)

foss-north strives to gather the best speakers, the best audience at the best location (Gothenburg) for one day each year. This year the event takes place on April 23 – get your tickets here!

It is just 7 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.

foss-north – the count down

Flashback time! At last year’s foss-north we had a great talk by Alexander Larsson introducing flatpak. You can see the recording right here (you might have to click the link if your aggregator hides YouTube contents)

foss-north strives to gather the best speakers, the best audience at the best location (Gothenburg) for one day each year. This year the event takes place on April 23 – get your tickets here!

It is just 8 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.

foss-north – the count down

At this year’s foss-north event FSFE will revive the Nordic Free Software Award and the conference will host the prize ceremony. Get your tickets for a great opportunity to meet with the FOSS community, learn new things and visit Gothenburg.

It is just 9 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.

foss-north – the count down

We are approaching the count down to foss-north 2018 – at least from an organizer perspective. This year we will be at Chalmers Conference Centre, in the centre of Gothenburg – the world’s most sociable, friendliest city. So, save the date – April 23 – and make sure to drop by.

The reason why it feels like the count down has started is that it is just 10 more days left of the Call for Papers. With the help of our great sponsors we have the opportunity to transport you to our conference if you are selected to speak. Make sure to make your submission before March 11 and you are in the race.

When moving to Chalmers we ended up with a larger venue than last year so make sure to get your ticket – and bring your friends. The saying “the more the merrier” definitely applies to FOSS conferences!

Berlin for a month

A month ago my family and I left our home to go to a new country and city for a month. As an experiment. As a source of variation. As something new. As an adventure.

The background to going to Berlin is that we’re starting a new office in Berlin and people need to be onboarded (we are also looking for people in Gothenburg). This requires someone on the ground. At the same time, we, as a family, have been playing with the idea to relocated for a longer or shorter period and the timing of this opportunity was nice, as the length of the trip was short enough to be manageable.

The move led to a lot of changes. We went from a city of 40000 inhabitants to Berlin with around four million. We moved from a house of 200 square meters to a two room apartment of around 50 square meters. We also moved from two working adults with kids attending school, to four weeks of home schooling and one parent taking care of the home.

From a work perspective, it has been fun to get to know a group of new colleagues from all over the world. From that perspective, Berlin is very un-german. Everyone seems happy to speak English and you always encounter people from various background. Still, I got some proper german practice, so I now master explaining that my german is bad :-)

From a family perspective, things have been better than I ever expected. The benefit of a big city is that there are a million things to do. The feeling is more that we are running out of time, rather than that we want to go back home again. Also, the sheer selection of playgrounds in Berlin is really great. We have three good playgrounds within 2-3 blocks from our apartment, so plenty of variation.

Another family related issue is the ease of commuting. I went from a 45 minutes train ride to a 3-4 minutes walk, which gives me a lot more time to spend with my family. At the same time, it does take away 90 minutes everyday of concentrated mail management, which means that my inbox currently is in a very sad state.

Another aspect in the same direction is that we spend a lot more time together as a family, partly since the kids don’t run off to their friends right after school. This also means that I get a lot less free time for taking care of hobbies such as foss-north and foss-gbg.

As you can tell, most aspects of this temporary change are double-edged. If I were to move anywhere permanently, some of this would have to be resolved. At the same time, I got a month of working in Germany combined with way more time with my kids and wife than I usually get, so I would not want to change anything. I think that this picture really sums things up. Berlin is a city of contrasts and compared to my life in Sweden, the way I lived in Berlin had a strong contrast as well.

foss-north 2017 follow-up

On the morning of April 26 I arrived at our venue, preparing for around 120 people to fill the rooms at foss-north 2017.

I’m still in the post-event cleaning up phase, so the visitor questionnaire has not yet been sent out, but the feeling is positive. This year we expanded changed venue and moved from one to two tracks. This led to more administration with two room hosts and double video recordings, so that everyone could see everything. The videos are available online now. You can either find a specific talk from the talks and speakers page, or simply enjoy the entire playlist here:

I’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who made this possible: Jeena and Johnny helping out recording videos and hosting. All our speakers. Our partners Swedsoft, FSFE and BRG. Our sponsors Semcon, Rebel Alliance, Blackduck Software, Capture Innovation and Qamcom. And all the visitors. Without anyone of these pieces, the puzzle would not come together.

I’m already looking forward to seeing you next year again!