Last week I was in Belgium, attending the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting — FOSDEM, for short. This conference is held every year and gathers people from all around the globe to discuss and publish FOSS-related matters. Belgian beer, waffles, french fries, and sub-zero temperatures were also in the agenda.
I talked briefly about testing in WebKit EFL, after the required tools have been implemented last year, and how it affected the quality of the port. Although I could broadcast what I was there for, the need to improve my public-speaking skills (specially in a foreign language) surely exists; I guess that the only way to improve this is practice. One could say I traveled a long distance just to talk fifteen minutes about software testing, but such places have a lot more to offer.
I’ve met a lot of people this time around (I’ve attended the same conference last year as well): people from the WebKit project (from Qt and GTK+ ports mostly — unfortunately meeting the Mac/Chromium guys in such events is a little bit more complicated), the EFL project, and watched some lectures on interesting subjects, such as domain-specific-languages&LLVM, text input in mobile devices (and how difficult it is), multi-path TCP (very interesting, by the way!), and even saw the Rasterman talking about EFL to a large audience. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to meet people I’d like to meet (the CMake guys, which I talked briefly while working on the WebKit-EFL build system), due to overlapping schedules. Oh, well.
Devices with Tizen were also there if you knew where to look and I was able to play around with them. Despite it still being a little bit rough in the edges (pun intended), I was very impressed by the overall smoothness. Granted that the hardware isn’t too shabby, but it was as snappy as an user interface should be. Can’t wait to get my hands on a Tizen device I can call my own.
I’ve also had the opportunity to drink more Club-Mate in the Brussels Hackerspace (in a new place since last year). Unfortunately my hackerspace passport arrived in the mail a couple days after I left for Europe, so I couldn’t get it properly stamped.
All in all, it was a great experience. I sure hope I’ll be able to attend this conference next year. And last, but certainly not least, I’d like to thank my employer, ProFUSION Embedded Systems, for sponsoring my trip.