Fedora at FOSDEM 2018

This is my experience at FOSDEM 2018. To start with, since 2013, many of my seniors who went to FOSDEM, described that to me as one of the biggest open source developer event on the planet. They often told me their experience with the event and the learning they got from it. This was my opportunity to put those feedbacks to test.

I traveled from Bangalore,India on 2018-02-01. My outbound was from BLR-AUH-BRU , it was fairly smooth. Just after completion of immigration checks, me followed exactly what was told by @skamath (Sachin Kamath). Connected to a wifi, walked to the train stop and boarded a got down at Brussels midi. Hotel Chambord was booked for all the Fedora volunteers (thanks to @zachmitzelos and @bex).

I checked in without a hitch and went out for a walk in the snow, and then met Alvero from Spain over couple of drinks and then later in evening met all the volunteers and walked to beer event!

Day1:

It was a fairly cold (3degrees) , Zach booked an Uber X , we all hopped in with the necessary stands for the Fedora Booth. It was a great experience as it was my first time at FOSDEM. We had the best place for Fedora booth, although it's closer to the door but it's always full of interactions and lively talk. Tom'spot'Callaway brought flash drives with him and there were a lot of stickers. Sanqui assembled and flashed the fedorator. Alexendra from Russia got a Rpi3b ARM powered with Fedora.

Bex and Zach already broke the day into mutiple timesolts which enabled every booth volunteer to work in designated hours in booth and then spend the rest on talks, visiting other booths and swag hunting.

I remember for the first time in forever,it was packed with about 8000+ open source enthusiast many of them came forward and  appreciated fedorator and fedora project in general.

I love the amount of interest that people had when they were asking about modularity and it actually showed how much we are looked up at as daily servers by users and developers around the world.

The second half of the day was full of energy like the first half, I went and visited gnome , kde , Mozilla and VLC booths. It is once in lifetime experience I will always cherish.

In the evening Bex too the Fedorans out for a dinner at drug Opera and it was good session where we all started to talk about the experience. 

 

Day2:

This is the day which I will never forget in my life as I visualize the scene of every devroom fully packed. Arvind came down from Delft and it was a really good time meeting him outside Red Hat , catching up on fries and coffee.

The first half of the day I spent in the Fedora booth and we had a lot of people coming up and asking what's new and how they use Fedora as their daily driver.

Around evening , I had a discussion with Tim Flink about how the conference experience and about QA teams works.

It was a very productive conference and there is a lot of learning which I took out of this one in specific. I am very grateful to Zack,Bex , Mariana and all who voted on my ticket.