New blogpost:

@neil

I haven’t been to FOSDEM for ages, so some of this may have changed:

The first year I went, there were about 3,000 people. It felt enormous. The beer event on the Friday was packed, but we did get a table after about an hour (and then stayed until 6:30am). A lot of people who had used code found me (and bought me beer, which contributed to the late night). I went to some talks, but mostly it was an event to chat to people. The talks I went to were interesting but were mostly they were useful because each talk would be attended by 20-50 people who were interested in the topic and talking to them was useful. Often they didn’t actually attend the talk: arriving a bit late and not being able to get into the room would leave you surrounded by half a dozen or so people who were also working on the thing the talk was about, going to have coffee with those people was often more interesting than the talk (talks are less interactive and you can always see the recordings later).

I gave a in track talks a few times (at least two, possibly three? I lose track). This is definitely worth doing because of the breakfasts. Main track speakers are put up in the Novotel on the Grand Place and so they all go to the same breakfast. I had breakfast with Chris Lattner one year. With Simon Cozens (who had just given a talk about his new typesetter, SILE, a project I would have created if I’d had time and was super happy to see someone else doing) another.

The busiest year, I gave four talks (one main track, three dev room). This was the first year they expanded to the buildings that were a bit further away, and also the year it snowed and the temperature dropped to minus ten. It took several years for the skin in my nose to recover from waiting half an hour in that temperature for a taxi. Walking over the ice between the rooms was difficult. Not my favourite year, for several reasons.

The dev rooms are not really organised centrally in any meaningful way. It’s better to think of FOSDEM as a set of colocated federated conferences than one big one. Some dev rooms focus entirely on talks, some use it as more of a hackathon, a lot are somewhere in the middle. There’s no coordination of schedules because they’re really independent events that happen to be next to each other. You can walk between them easily, which is nice if you want to got to more than one, but you often get the most value by spending half a day or a day in a single dev room, especially one that isn’t back-to-back talks.

After the first couple of years, I mostly skipped dev room talks. I went to a few of the main track ones, but spent most of the time focused on talking to the other attendees.

@neil “the coin culture”, coffee shop on one corner of “U” building, on the main strip, is *slightly* calmer than elsewhere. I’ve just secured a comfy sofa seat to recharge myself a little

@jmtd Smart!

@neil I think you captured the experience in your post. Remember to rest and recover, its an intense event.

My first FOSDEM was 2015, I presented in 2020. The crowds really are overwhelming. Presenting at FOSDEM and knowing folks makes a huge difference. But I wouldn't attend now.

@anna wrote about their experience last year:

https://notapplicable.dev/daring-to-dream/

I really liked their references to systems design and came away with a book recommendation, that I need to get.

@neil When you said you were planning on going, my thought was that it would be far too crowded and far too much booze for your liking.

@onepict @anna That's a great blogpost - thanks so much for flagging it!

@mansr Oh, I avoided all the alcohol events

But you were right about crowds.

@neil That is extremely useful to know. Thankyou!

@neil Oh wow this saddens me immensely to hear. My takeaways would likely have been the same as yours it seems.

It can be incredibly hard as an organizer to say no, but that does seem to be what has been the problem here. The number of attendees need to match the venue size, and scheduling talks properly is much more important than total talk throughput.

Thank you for your writeup.

@neil Sounds like it hasn't changed much since the times I went there, in the early '00s.

People getting up and leaving as soon as the Q&A started was the most annoying thing for me. This is not how conferences are meant to happen, and I find it incredibly rude.

The SF cons I've been to have all scheduled 1h talks with 30m between, so you get time for a breather.

The academic ones have usually been more tightly packed, but with, say, 2-3 closely themed talks/session.

@troed @neil last year, I heard that Fosdem doesn't have a registration system, and that causes way too many people to attend in too little space. Is this true?

@loke @troed @neil "You don't need to register. Just turn up and join in!" not been there IRL myself since 2023 however, watching online from Sweden this year

@neil I've only ever gone as part of a group, which may or may not mitigate some of your experience (it doesn't make any difference to people being oblivious about quietly entering or leaving talks, mind)

I think the issue with timing is that it's not really one event, it's a whole bunch of mostly independent events, with dev rooms being entirely run by their organisers

RichiH tends to give some kind of infrastructure talk on the Sunday which you might find interesting and maybe will go into the WiFi

@neil @justine especially if you are just attending and have back to back talks across multiple buildings; meeting people ends up being a (lovely) distraction

@loke @troed Yes, there is no registration, or counting of attendees.

@neil @loke

Well. There's the problem then, besides not running a synchronized talk schedule with ample time to move between talks (which is also usually the setup/preparation time needed for presenters).

@annehargreaves @neil yeah honestly that sounds like a hate crime