In the good tradition about writing a blog post on my way back from a FOSDEM (see earlier installments e.g. for 2012, 2010, 2008, and 2007), here is this year's take.
No issues with transportation this time (I'm still in the train, but it looks good so far), other than road construction works at the venue, which itself seems to establish a tradition now ;)
This year I stayed in the Be Manos hotel – near to Gare du Midi – which was quite nice. Since I find myself being too old for the pre-FOSDEM beer event, I did not attend it. I had my share of Leffe Bruin (my favorite belgium beer) in the hotel lobby though.
The temperature was around +8°, much better than FROZDEM 2012, where it had -20°.
I saw 5 presentations, 4 of those which were quite good. That's a better ratio than in previous years. My favorite talk was given by Carsten 'Rasterman' Heitzler, an ex-Openmoko colleague who is now working for SAMSUNG on Tizen's graphical subsystems (EFL-based).
Most important though were the people I met, a lot of old and new friends, in particular Phil Blundell, Harald Welte, Daniel Willmann, Jan Lübbe, Marcin 'HRW' J., Paul Espin, Florian Boor, and many more. Seeing all of you alive and kicking gave me a lot of positive energy!
I'm returning excited and with many mental notes of things to check out and the motivation to make a major contribution to at least one open project this year. See you all soon!