The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is the largest event in Europe for open source developers to gather, present their current and future projects and also meet old friends and new acquaintances. Best of all, the event is free. It takes place at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, on the Solbosch campus. Expect around 800 talks and presentations over the weekend, and meet over 8000 fellow developers. All talks are also streamed live and recorded. This is useful both for people who can’t attend in person and also if a Devroom is too crowded and one can’t get in. There’s always the chance to watch the stream, or watch the recording later. But of course, that is a one-way street, and the recording doesn’t allow you to ask questions right there and then, or join a hallway discussion about what one just learned in a talk.

Around FOSDEM, you will also find a number of auxiliary events, most of them taking place in the week before the FOSDEM weekend. You can visit the Fringe website for more details. 

One of these events is the FOSDEM PGDay, which traditionally takes place on the Friday before FOSDEM. This is a one day, one track conference with 7 PostgreSQL talks which are more suited for a dedicated conference. Whereas the PostgreSQL Devroom at FOSDEM, on Sunday, has talks that are targeting a broader developer audience.

At Neon, we are looking forward to visiting FOSDEM and engaging with a broad range of developers who might have questions about serverless PostgreSQL, developer workflows, and how it fits  their applications and use cases. There are several database-related Devrooms on the schedule, as well as projects with a stand where everyone can discuss features and ideas.

We asked our team which projects, devrooms, and talks they want to visit, and here is a small selection of what we will see as useful for us.

Here is a selection of Projects, Devrooms, and Talks we recommend you to visit and attend.

Projects

The PostgreSQL Project has both a Devroom on Sunday as well as a stand on Saturday and Sunday. We expect to have many good discussions there and meet users and developers.

There are also stands for many of the well-known Linux distributions. AlmaLinux, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Rocky Linux, and others. We are using some of these Linux distributions in the Neon infrastructure or on our personal laptops and are keen to find out what news we will see in the coming weeks and months.

Devrooms

FOSDEM hosts about 30 Devrooms over the weekend, in addition to the main tracks. A devroom is a track, moderated by a project. The open source project runs the Call for Papers, selects the talks, and confirms the speakers. This is like a mini-conference in the larger FOSDEM conference. Imagine attending a conference and having the choice of 20+ parallel talks. There’s a broad range of topics, we are mostly interested in the database and operating systems talks, as well as all the news around AI and Machine Learning. Being developers ourselves, the LLVM, the GCC the Debuggers, and the Testing devrooms also have interesting talks for us. And let’s not forget about Containers, in the end our code needs to run somewhere.

You see: plenty of choices, and not enough hours in one weekend! Luckily, there are the recordings.

Presentations

And finally, here is our very personal selection of talks we would like to see over the FOSDEM weekend:

• Building Open Source Language Models: the advances in this area over the past months are amazing, let’s see what the future holds for us.
• Practical CI/CD Observability with OpenTelemetry: having better observability and telemetry will help us develop better products for our customers.
• Your Virtual DBA (PostgreSQL on Kubernetes using an Operator): maintaining a large fleet of containerized databases is not an easy task, and any help is surely welcome.
• Clustering in PostgreSQL: Because one database server is never enough (and neither is two): providing high availability for our users is a high priority for us.
• Reducing Costs and Improving Performance With Data Modeling in Postgres: We are constantly tweaking and extending PostgreSQL, any insight into the internals is surely welcome.
• Introducing Observability to an airline: Being an aviation geek certainly makes this an interesting talk.
• Isolation Levels and MVCC in SQL Databases: A Technical Comparative Study
• Open Source Security: Although this is not a hosted talk like the others, as a company that does provide an open-source product, it is interesting to hear other people’s thoughts about recent legislative changes in the area of supply chain security.

Summary

FOSDEM is always an interesting event. Not only because of all the presentations but mainly because it is a good opportunity to get in touch with other developers and talk about new ideas and features. The broad range of good presentations is certainly a plus on top. And let’s not forget the good food in Brussels, and the chocolate for the people at home.

This article here includes useful information about the travel to the conference, the FOSDEM PGDay and the Devroom at FOSDEM.

See you all in Brussels!