FOSDEM 2010 - part 1 #

Four years ago I was working in Saarbrücken. From there it is a very short ride over to FOSDEM (little more than 300km). So I decided - hey, why not stay there for a weekend. I found a very nice Brussels bed and breakfast hotel called Rovignon - featuring not only comfortable rooms at reasonable prizes but also cats in the house.

Back then, I barely knew anyone at the conference. However the lineup of speakers including St Peter from XMPP and Georg Greve from FSFE was impressive.

As a result it became a loved tradition of Thilo and myself to drive over to Brussels, attend FOSDEM and watch great talks. Over time there were more and more familiar faces, e.g. at the FSFE booth, among the Debian people…

Last weekend I had an awesome time in Brussels at FOSDEM for the fourth time in a row. I am honoured to have been invited by the FOSDEM organisers for a main track talk on Hadoop in the scalability slot (in Janson…).

We arrived on Friday afternoon, however being awefully tired we unfortunately could not join the Friday evening beer event (though, as I am not drinking beer, I would probably have missed quite a bit of the fun).