hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3010.txt

Episode: 3010
Title: HPR3010: FOSDEM first impressions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3010/hpr3010.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:06:56

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,010 for Friday 14 February 2020.
Today's show is entitled FOSDEM First Impressions.
It is hosted by Andrew Conway and is about 27 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is.
Impressions from my first attendance at FOSDEMessia.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthos.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthos.com.
Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,010 for Friday 14 February 2020.
Hello Hacker Public Radio people. This is McNally or Andrew here.
Hello Hacker Public Radio people. This is McNally or Andrew here.
And what I want to give you are my impressions of FOSDEM and this is my first attendance at FOSDEM.
So I hope some of my impressions are of interest to you.
And if you've not attended before perhaps you might get some pointers from a relative nub at FOSDEM.
So please excuse the background noise.
I was wandering amongst people in noisy rooms.
I was out in the wind in the rain. I'm talking off the cuff.
So I apologise if the audio quality isn't always as good as it could be.
I'm actually speaking now in my own house after just having returned from FOSDEM.
And there'll be another bit at the end where I'll recount my reflections of FOSDEM on my journey home.
Okay so I'll hand you over to me at FOSDEM.
Well I'm here at FOSDEM and I'm going to just give you a little feel for what it might be like to come here because I've never been to FOSDEM before.
And this is the second day of FOSDEM 2020.
So I'm just going to record a few little snippets and then edit them together and I try not to edit.
The way this is going to work, I'll just do a few throughout this second day of FOSDEM.
And I'll just tell you what it's like. So it's a wet rainy day in Brussels.
Apparently that's common because FOSDEM is in late January early February every year.
And yeah it's not a nice day, I'll be honest, it's pretty grim day.
But I'm stood just outside one of the many locations where you'll find stands and displays at FOSDEM.
I'm here of course representing Hacker Public Radio and inside at the moment are Ken Fallon and JWP or John.
And Benny is around as well, Marshall was here yesterday and I'm sure there's other people I could mention that you'd know the names of Pete Cannon has been around.
And loads of people. And that's the first thing I would say is when you're here is actually overwhelming.
It's immediately obvious that FOSDEM is many thousands of people.
I've heard up to possibly 10,000 people certainly in one room, the main lecture theater I counted, I estimated.
There was about 2,000 people in that room in seated and standing.
In fact the main problem with FOSDEM is I can't get into any of the talks.
Talks in the smaller rooms are often oversubscribed and in the big rooms you can usually squeeze in at the back easily enough even if it's busy.
So that would be my first piece of advice is you need to be able to get, if you want to go to one of the smaller talks in the smaller rooms you have to get there and pitch up and get a seat well in advance of when you're the talk you're interested is going to be.
In fact some people just get in there at the beginning of the first session and just stay there the whole time.
For certain tracks as they're called, there's one in Python that I attended yesterday.
That one wasn't too busy, I could just drop in.
But the one in retro computing, I just could not get in at all.
I don't know how you get in that one, I think you just have to queue up the night before or something.
Okay I joke, but it's pretty bad.
Anyway I'm going to go in the hall now, just get a bit noisy and I'm just going to walk up and down until you what I see.
So yeah, well there's quite a lot of people, a lot of people queuing to get in stands.
I'm stood at the hacker public radio stand just now and Ken and JWP are holding forth.
I walk up the corridor and oh yeah one curious thing is that a lot of display boards and vending machines are covered in brown paper.
So we can attach false dem related temporary posters without having to disrupt anything else or tapes up to walls and have paint pulled off.
So yeah it's pretty strange set up when you're not used to it.
People are, you know, one funny thing about it is that the people here on to my mind look a bit familiar.
I mean some I do know, but what I mean is that you can tell almost at a glance when you're walking on bristles outside of false dem,
which of these people are coming to false dem because they just kind of look like, well how to put it, they look like geeks, they look like nerds, they look a bit like me.
Yeah, you know, sort of shuffling around looking a bit distracted thinking about hacking into something in there.
Oh sorry, hacking their code together or something like that.
Yeah so actually it's quite quiet now because I think the talks of all our mid-session, it gets busy in bursts as people come out of the talks.
And I've just come to the volunteer bit of false dem where you can volunteer to help out.
The other curious thing, and I don't think this is usual at false dem, there's quite a lot of face masks this year.
And I believe that's because of the coronavirus that's commuting Wuhan.
But when I say quite a lot, I mean like one in a hundred people here, which is still when you count up when there's maybe several thousand people here still quite a lot.
Yeah, okay so that's my first snippet done, I'll come back to this later on.
So I'm now doing an important task in false dem, actually in life too, I'm going off to find food.
So I'm just outside the HPR stand, well the building with HPR stand is.
And I've just left Ken holding forth convincing somebody to contribute to HPR.
And interestingly enough, Benny has run into a couple of students when he was a teacher a few years ago.
A couple of his students, quite independently of him, have ended up in come to false dem.
And when they just went into the room opposite us, which is a very well-entended talk on TypeScript, which is a sort of version of Java script produced by Microsoft I think.
But you can go and listen to Benny show, because he's actually getting his former students to give a quick summary of the interesting talk they attended.
So it's actually some of the youngest people that we've ever had in H like a public radio.
Maybe we've had young hosts before, but I've never come across them in recent years.
So I'm headed, some bottles being emptied, I'm nearing where the food is.
So I'm walking up in the rain, well wrapped up with my cap on, and ahead of me is a collection of interesting smelly trucks.
It's interesting smells coming from the trucks, as they're called. I'm called them vans, actually food vans.
And they're outside in this big lane in the middle of the university buildings here at Fosdem.
And the cues are not too big at the moment, because I'm coming early.
Also, I've timed this. It's another good tip if you're coming to Fosdem next year.
Don't try and go to get your food or coffee just after a talk, so I've ended sale it on the hour, wherever.
The time divisions of talks are, because that's when you'll have to wait the longest cues.
So we'll give it 10, 15 minutes. I've just been told this by Ken to be honest, but if I stopped to think about it, it would've been obvious.
So I'm just going up to see if I can find some baguette or something.
I had a rat yesterday, that was very nice. Oh gosh, there's hot dogs, there's pasta, there's pizza, there's Belgian fries.
Because you know French fries aren't really from France. Some American soldiers overheard.
Some people speaking French, making fries, topped up thin strips of potato.
And so they assume they were French fries, but they weren't, they were Belgian.
And actually Belgian fries are just more like chips to me. They're just, they're not as thin as French fries that you would get to see in McDonald's or elsewhere.
Anyway, so I'm just going to go and get my food. Now the cues are short, so I shall eat.
In the last little bit that I did, I was going for lunch, rather very early lunch, because that's the other thing it was to eat early.
Because if you go eat it lunch time, then well, you'll just find yourself in big cues.
So I'm now going to get coffee. Of course, coffee is quite important. There's a number of places where you can get coffee.
But actually I don't want to bore you today with me drinking coffee and eating is important as those things may be.
What I'd like to talk to you about now is how well-organised Fos Demits.
Now the first thing you'd notice is that there's quite a lot of people wondering about in orange shirts and actually different colours of shirts,
but orange shirts are probably most numerous and most noticeable. Now I'll give you an example.
In the first night, I went to the gathering in the centre of Brussels at a place called the Delirium Café, which is in fact a bar pub.
And I was greeted at the door by somebody in an orange shirt and I didn't realise what this meant.
But I've had looked at it. We just said Fos Dem on it, but it was crowded with people, so I didn't.
And then he stopped me from politely, stopped me from going any further and going into the bar and said, what's your favourite software license?
Now, at first I was like, what's this? And then I thought, oh, it must be a question to check that I'm actually at Fos Dem,
because maybe only Fos Dem type people are allowed in there.
Well, I said GPO version 2, just not that that's my favourite, just because that's the one that came into my head first.
And he looked at me a little bit suspiciously as if, well, maybe you should have said 3, but actually you could have said Windows user end license agreement,
you'll have a thing and that would have worked too because it's a software license. He was just checking whether I was geeky enough to get into the Fos Dem event,
which of course I am. I was a little bit upset, you know, the way that you, you know, when you get, I asked for ID when you first go to pubs and bars.
I don't know if that happens in other countries, but does in Britain, I certainly got chucked out to my first pub at the age of 15, because I was underage and I couldn't prove I was 16 or over.
So he was a little bit like that, I said, doing not look geeky enough. But anyway, that's the kind of quite gentle, lowkey, but highly efficient way that Fos Dem operates.
Now these people, very pleasant, they will try and, they are quite strict in certain regards, like for example, if there's a sign on the room that says full, then they won't let you in.
They're quite strict about that. The door is closed and says full, that's that, they won't let you in. If you jabber too loudly at the doorway to a talk, you'll probably also get politely told to move on.
I think they employ Dutch and German people for this duty mainly, they're very good at it, I have to say, because they just come straight to the point quite rightly in every case that I've seen.
So firm, but always fair, and as I say, quite gentle actually, you know, very well organized. I just walked past a queue of people going for a talk, and so that they didn't block the corridor.
They had a sort of taped off section, you know, like there's just poles and tape running along so that people could queue neatly around the corner in the corridor and not getting the way of people going to the stands.
So, you know, it's quite a lot of really well thought-out organisation, and they're all volunteers, of course, nobody's paid for this, it's all voluntary.
So, and I think, of course, people attending will try to pick up their rubbish and obey the rules, the very, very few rules that are set up.
Yeah, as to say, it's a very nice atmosphere.
So, it's now one o'clock, and once again, I've wandered out of the extremely noisy and busy area where the stands are, with an HPR stand.
We had a major success, we had an HPR poster that was taped to the window on the inside, and it kept falling off, we tried to put up three times, and then Benny being a genius taped it to the outside of the window
so that when it unrolled, unrolled into the window, if you understand what I mean, so it would stop falling off and pulling the tape off the window.
And that was a major success.
But what I wanted to talk about now, and I'm standing looking around me, is I'm looking around me at all the kind of people that attend, fosed in.
Now, the first thing you'd say, as well as all kinds here, is, you know, all kinds of people from different countries.
Yeah, dominantly from, I would say, mainland Europe, as in, there's a few people from Britain, but I don't think I've met any other scotch yet like me.
There was a guy in a kilt, he looked kind of Scottish, but I didn't hear him actually speak.
But mainly, a lot of French, quite a lot of Dutch, being spoken about German, quite few Swiss that I've encountered too.
But there's quite a few, not many, but certainly a number of, I've come over from the United States, maybe specially for fosed in.
So, I think working Europe anyway, I like JWP, for example, being that category.
So, and I think the most pleasant thing about it is, is that it's pleasant, you know, these kind of people all have a similar sort of outlook.
You know, they're all into free, you know, open source software, they're generally quite friendly.
If you launch into a HBO, about something technical, they generally quite like it, not everybody.
But, you know, that kind of thing, you're really into some script, you've written and pithed and say, and then you want to talk to somebody about it.
And it's not only that so happens as a friend or a family member in the vicinity, you start talking to them about it, and they're just not interested at all.
That's the exact opposite of that fosed aim.
And just stood at the stand, the HDR stand today.
I've had numerous conversations about all kinds of different topics.
And it's quite okay to start talking about the relative merits of XML and JSON and how you would parse it.
So, you know, whether that's a good way to interact with the feed on HPR and the pitfalls of RSS, all of that kind of stuff you can just talk about.
Now, one thing though, I would say criticize, that's the wrong word.
One thing that is extremely notable is that the high male to female ratio here.
Now, for some reason, it's not as bad today, Sunday, as it was yesterday, Saturday.
Now, without that, because I was in talks yesterday, and I was self-selectingly going to talks that males liked, I don't know.
But it definitely seems like there's more female faces.
When I'm stood at the stand, watching faces go by, I'm seeing, well, I would say it's probably 10 to 1 male to female, which still sounds pretty high, it is high.
But it's very clear that the techy community here is male-dominated.
So, I don't know what you do about that. Is there anything you can do about that? Well, I don't know.
Certainly, there's not that I've seen anyway. There's no sense of not being welcome, whether you're female or not.
Actually, another strange thing I would observe is that quite a few people have noticed where actually, for my glance, it's pretty hard to tell which sex they are.
Maybe it doesn't matter, something doesn't bother me.
But, yeah, again, what I would say is that really you've got a real mix of people other than the gender side of things.
And somewhere, well, it takes a while. So many people that freaks me out about, I'll be honest with you.
But once you're certain relax a bit and just get chatting, people will relax more in the Sunday, I would think.
That's normal at conferences. Certainly true at Fosden.
Then you can really strike up quite a few interesting conversations.
So this is the last segment of this, my first impressions of my first Fosden at the time doing.
And it's now half past four in the Sunday, so things have really, really obviously started to wind down.
In fact, I'm working down a corridor as a guy asleep in a bench, so he's not just winding down but lying down.
The people here chatting feels quite relaxed. I've been asked if I could give a quick summary of feedback on the HDR table.
So this last segment is really going to be about that.
And I have to say, first thing, I found lots of friendly people.
Very few, I would say fewer than one in ten that I spoke to had heard of Hacker Public Radio before.
And I lost track of how many people I spoke today could be a hundred. I don't know.
I can't tell you. I've been repeating myself and certainly between Ken and myself and Benny and John, GWP, I think we've spoken to several hundred people today.
And all of them would have heard a bit about Hacker Public Radio. And certainly every single person I spoke to thought it was a good idea.
Maybe a couple of people were in a rush and didn't really want to hear about it, but that's very, very few.
And as I said, they seemed to be in a rush and, you know, that was not any reflection Hacker Public Radio at all.
But the vast majority of people, like maybe sort of like 1995, 1999 of 100 explicitly said, oh, that sounds pretty good, I'd never heard of anything like that.
On the back of that, a few said, oh, do you do video as well? And I said, well, no, we don't.
Another common question we got, of course, we're in Belgium, remember, not far from France, is asked, we're asked about, can we do it in Hacker Public Radio episode in French?
To which our answer was, why not? You know, and of course that would be a problem for us if we have a mainly English speaking audience or maybe English is a second language to have other languages become too prominent.
I mean, I could listen to that many often. But I think probably is worth thinking about if a French group did develop, for example, as a result of being here in Fosden,
and I know other people out there, I've mentioned this to Yannick and Telegram today, if somebody out there, we took on the odd Hacker Public Radio show in French.
We published that in the mainstream, and there weren't too many of them that our regular listeners weren't too bothered by it.
That would be okay, but probably the better thing to do would be to create a, if somebody was willing to cheerate who was a native French speaker,
we set up a parallel stream in French, and maybe there's not a full five days a week, maybe it's two days a week or something like that.
But I think the only way we could really do that is, as I say, a native French speaker were to, or it's between native, doesn't it?
It just needs to be somebody who is what they could speak French and reasonably conversant with how to run the website of things and it could talk.
You can communicate and get on well with Ken Fallon and Dave Morris, so I would think at a minimum, yeah, it could be done.
So other than that, yeah, just very, very positive, just got a sort of warm fuzzy glow when one person came up to me and said, hey, you're a Scottish aren't you?
And turns out he likes Tox Jam, and listens to me, Kevin and Dave doing Tox Jam.
I was really nice, so I shook my hand and thanked me for that.
But I'm really genuinely touched when that kind of thing happens.
A lot of people say, hey, this one is really cool, keep up the good work.
About hacker public radio, and my contribution is really rather small.
I think Ken and Dave, the two stall works there, but I'll be honest, when you get thanked for work that is good, even if it's not my own work, it makes me more inclined to contribute more.
So I think I will find ways to do more to help Ken and Dave.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that's a brief, but I think it represents to somebody of the comments that I've had throughout the day.
I've been thoroughly enjoyable, somewhat tiring, but yeah, but I don't mind.
Well, a bit ago, I see the guy that was fast asleep on his side is actually now woken up and is sitting up.
I wonder if he's had too much beard as well.
So, I'm back home now in a relative peace and quiet of my house.
And it was quite a long journey back.
I was, yeah, my Brussels to Glasgow.
A fair distance, I have to go along the North Sea.
But it gave me quite a lot of time to reflect on the experience of being there.
And it's quite interesting, because what I did in the way back was, I didn't feel it really in my books,
but I felt compelled to go and read up about various things that I had discovered.
And for example, when I was in the Eurostar train bag, I spent almost the whole time on that,
reading about the history of Unix, Ken Thompson, and the space travel game,
which I heard in, well, the history of Unix talk, and the generation gaps talk as well in the history track.
And also, that caused me to jump off and bounce around the internet.
You know, I've filled in a few gaps.
I've never quite understood how Unix came about.
And it was quite interesting for me to fill in those missing gaps in the history of computing,
which has been very important in my life.
So that was the first thing, I would say.
The second thing I originally, but was go, just because there was, I think, Ken and I,
and some others bumped into this chat, I forget his name, I think, dead programme.
I think was his handle, I forget his real name.
I'd start talking about tiny go, which is a reduced version of go.
But some of the things he said about go, and I didn't, again, I didn't realise that it was,
I'd never looked at go before, I had a go language.
And when he said it was based on C, but fixed many of the drawbacks of C,
because C was, of course, invented back in the old days,
I thought, well, I quite like the sound of go.
So I went and read about go and went through the go tutorials on my phone,
as I chucked along in the Eurostar and my way home.
And then, of course, I discovered that Ken Thompson was instrumental in creation of go.
So I now know a little bit, I mean, I can now do a little bit of go programming,
which I've never done before.
So, you know, so, again, Fos Dem prompted me to do that.
And the third little bit of reflection that I take away from it is that we're so used,
well, I'm used to working with all this phone opens or software,
and you go to the package manager or whatever, and you just type, you know,
the command apt get from any of you, but for me, Slack package is the command I use in Slackware.
And you pull in your software and compile it, whatever you do, most people look compile it.
I am in Slackware, obviously. So I do quite a bit.
But what I sort of forget in my head is this stuff where nothing just appeared out of nowhere,
this entire communities of people, and in fact, more than that,
in some cases, there's individuals that dedicate a huge amount of time
to producing their software.
And I think going to Fos Dem, actually seeing some of those people,
actually meeting the developers and seeing this human being stand in front of me,
some of them quite young, you know, I mean, it was one case,
I think Ken Fallon went off and interviewed a 15-year-old
who'd done this kind of classroom management package thing.
You know, I was really struck by how passionate some of these people were.
I kind of, some of my head thought many of the software packages were big teams of developers
and older, more seasoned programmers, but you know, it's more vibrant than that.
It's just came out now. It's been produced. There's a lot of churn in these old projects
that look like they've got a massive team.
Actually, they're being carried by maybe just one enthusiastic individual at any given time.
Yes, I mean, people contribute to it, but as somebody who's really owning it and loving it,
and then, well, they grow up, they have to kids, whatever, somebody has to come along.
And I've really got Fos Dem, because it was so big,
it was so many different people there from so many of the projects that I use.
I'm talking like Libra Office, I'm talking like Next Cloud, many smaller ones that I can mention too,
but those are the two that I just stumbled upon when I was there.
Really gave me a feel for the human investment that goes into the software that I use every day.
So, yeah, I think of all the things that I've come away with.
That's probably on my return. That's probably sitting at the front of my mind.
So, well, you know what I'm going to say? I'm going to say, yeah, go to Fos Dem.
If you can, it's two days of, it's quite intense, quite busy.
I don't like crowds, I don't like lots of people.
I like to sit there quite room by myself, but it's definitely, even with that,
it's definitely worth doing.
I thoroughly recommend it. Hopefully I'll see you there next year in 2021.
Thanks for listening.
You've been listening to Hecker Public Radio at HeckerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday to Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is.
Hecker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club
and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly,
leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under Creative Commons,
Attribution, ShareLite, 3.0 license.