Thoughts 'n Stuff

FOSDEM 2013

I am back from FOSDEM and I am always surprised how quickly it’s all over. Would you believe that I only got to attend two talks again, one of them being my own about Wayland input methods?

Friday Feb 1st

I arrived Friday evening, this time by train. Since I bought my first BahnCard ever in August last year, I am slowly convinced now that flying is just a huge waste of time and should be the last possibility to consider, not the first. Even though I spend much more time on the train than I would on the airplane I still travel more relaxed. Others claim to be super-productive on trains. I am happy enough if I get to braindump my thoughts into my notebook (the dead-tree variant) and then read a book (more dead-tree) to forget about work for once.

Another trick for better conferencing is to arrive (or leave) 1-2 days earlier (later), as this helps catching up with sleep and allows to process thoughts or just do some random stuff not related to conferencing, say, going to a museum or gallery. It allows me to be reckless to myself during the conference without needing one week to recover.

But back to that Friday evening: I was very happy that Quim could make it to our dinner at the Kabash. I knew he had a busy schedule for the next days and that I probably wouldn’t be able to meet him in Berlin. I think he enjoys working for Wikimedia even though he now has to pay for phone calls and 3G. We also had people from Igalia, Digia and Intel OTC joining. We enjoyed great food and nice conversations, then headed off to the beer event. This one has become crazily crowded. It’s nigh impossible to find people you know. Meeting new people is also a challenge. The entire concept of what should be a simple meet&greet is lost these days.

Saturday Feb 2nd

Jens and I arrived around 10am at the campus on Saturday, probably a first for both of us to be so early. It was so empty you could think they’d cancelled FOSDEM but that quickly changed of course. I had zero slides done by then and no motivation to do them either. I went to Dave’s talk and it was nice to see him and Mardy working on a relevant project again. As expected, GOA is dead in the water by now and work will most likely continue with accounts-sso. I realized that I would have to recycle an older talk for some slides, something I loathe to do.

Somewhere in between I had to meet some OpenEmbedded guys to debug Maliit on their custom hardware, but we didn’t get much further than realizing that dlopen() didn’t work properly.

Funniest thing that happened that Saturday was probably rasterman, timj and thiago trashing-talking about the kernel when they could have told each other how much their toolkits suck!

Biggest reveal of the day, however, was that Rob Taylor toured with the Darkness in his crazier years.

Jens was unlucky with his hands-on DLNA talk, but I blame it on the room (Lameere). I remember that my talk there last year was crap, too. None of his prepared demos worked and people started to leave the room. I felt bad for him because I the was one who pushed him into giving the talk. Mark took over the second half and surprisingly, all of his dLeyna demos worked. He got applause (and rightfully so) for each of them.

I only had two hours left by then for my talk (slides). Meeting more people all the time didn’t exactly help with my preparations. I was close to call Luc (organizer of the Xorg DevRoom) and ask him to cancel my talk. I am glad I didn’t because it turned out that worrying about my talk for the whole day was the best way to get back into the topic. You have to understand that Wayland input methods is a yesteryears project for me, all the hard thoughtwork as been done already and I have been mostly working on new projects since August last year. I think the talk was well received by the audience (at least the room was packed). However, I cheated by simplifying and ignoring the actual complexity of input methods a bit.

It was already getting late and by the time we arrived in Brussels center it was about time to head to the Gnome party. Same place at last year, but by around 11pm we had occupied the whole building. I didn’t even know half the guys. Gut feeling tells me this is a side effect of the UX hackfest that happend before, but I would like to believe that the Gnome community is growing again. It was great to see Gnome legends such as Federico or Alp attending, I think both of whom I had last (and first) seen in 2008.

Sunday Feb 3rd

I thought I’d be able to attend a couple of talks on Sunday, but I got stuck talking to people interested in actually working open-source DLNA stacks. I got invited to join the Xorg dinner in the evening, with half of the people being BSD guys. Xorg? BSD? I was fearing for my sanity. Some other embarassment might better be left unmentioned in this blog but the food and wine at least was great! Afterwards we ended up at Delirium again (where else …). At 2am we had to move to the Absinthe bar right next to Delirum. Wiser men than me (such as krh and Rob Clark, who now works for Red Hat!) left before, however. And so we ended up with more beer and several shots of Absinthe until the wee morning hours. Jon made the mistake at that point to ask me about my honest opinion (I actually don’t know why he tagged along with the Xorg hackers for so long), he might regret that by now. Wrong time, wrong place. Happens.

Monday Feb 4th

I had to checkout at 11am and get my train at 2:30pm. How I managed to get up by 11:15am I still don’t know. But luckily I was able to meet with Kat, Dave, Martin & Tobias for some waffle & chocolate breakfast. This was a much better FOSDEM ending than last year.

Tobias chose the same ICE train as me. Poor him, he had no idea what was coming for him: He had to endure my satirical reality talk from Brussels to Cologne. Both of us had to change trains then, with him heading off to Hamburg and me returning to Berlin. I wish I could have made it back a couple hours earlier now because I missed Quim’s presentation in the Wikimedia office.

Exhausted but happy, I finally arrived at home on Monday night.