FOSDEM 2013 - 01 # On Friday morning our train left for this year’s FOSDEM. Though a bit longish I have a strong preference for going by train as this gives more time and opportunity for hacking (in my case trying out Elastic Search), reading (in my case the book “Team Geek”) and chatting with other FOSDEM visitors. Monday morning was mostly busy with meeting people - at the FSFE, Debian, Apache Open Office booths, generally in the hallways. ...
FOSDEM - Sunday - smaller bits and pieces # With WebODF the Office track featured a very interesting project that focusses on providing a means to open ODF documents in your favourite browser: Content and formatting are converted to a form that can easily be dealt with by using a combination of HTML and CSS. Advanced editing is then supported by using JavaScript. With Open Stack the following talk focussed on an open cloud stack project that was started by NASA and Rackspace as both simultanously needed support for an open source, openly designed, developed cloud stack that strives for community inclusion. ...
FOSDEM - HBase at Facebook Messaging # Nicolas Spiegelberg gave an awesome introduction not only to the architecture that powers Facebook messaging but also to the design decisions behind their use of Apache HBase as a storage backend. Disclaimer: HBase is being used for message storage, for attachements with Haystack a different backend is used. The reasons to go for HBase include its strong consistency model, support for auto failover, load balancing of shards, support for compression, atomic read-modify-write support and the inherent Map/Reduce support. ...
FOSDEM - Django # The languages/ cloud computing track on Sunday started with the good, the bad and the ugly of Django's architecture. Without much ado the speaker started by giving a high level overview of the general package layout of Django - unfortunately not going into too much detail on the architecture itself. What he loves about Django are the model layer abstractions that really are no ORM only - instead both relational and non-relational databases can be supported easily. ...
FOSDEM - Saturday # Day one at FOSDEM started with a very interesting and timely keynote by Eben Moglen: Starting with the example of Egypt he voted for de-centralized distributed and thus harder to take over communication systems. In terms of tooling we are already almost there. Most use cases like micro blogging, social networking and real time communications can already be implemented in a distributed, fail safe way. So instead of going for convenience it is time to think about digital independence from very few central providers. ...
FOSDEM - video recordings online # As published in the FOSDEM blog the video recordings are available online - at least for the main track and the lightning talks. Happy video watching!
FOSDEM 2010 - part 2 # The event itself featured 306 talks - so pretty hard to choose what to watch on two days. This time, not only the main tracks were awesome, but also several dev rooms featured very interesting talks by well known FOSS developers. Saturday started with a FOSDEM birthday dance done by all attendees. The first keynote speaker Brooks Davis explained his experiences promoting open source methods at a large company. ...
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. ...