FOSDEM 2012 review

This year, I attended FOSDEM in Brussels for the second time. Unlike last year where I went on my own, this time I took 3 of my fellow Den Bosch Linux Users Group members with me ;) Sander (also a member of the dbLUG) also attended, like last year where we met for the first time.

I went to pick the guys up on the Saturday morning at 07:30. It had snowed a lot on the previous day, so the drive from Den Bosch to Brussels was not the nicest (lot of snow/ice on the non-highway roads, thick fog on the highway with 50m visibility) but I managed to get everybody safe to the venue, one hour before the start of the welcome talk. I had expected to have some trouble finding a parking spot, but we found one just next to the University. Sweet!

At the end of the day, we had some trouble finding a parking spot near our hotel... Well, actually it was a youth hostel, the same that I went to last year as well. I had reserved a room for 4, which apart from my noisy double-decker bed, was really just fine. We left our room to go get some food in the center, which is about 10 minutes walking. Due to all the snow and ice, it took us a while longer, but we eventually arrived on the Grand Place. After some quick looking around as tourists, we took one of the streets at random, and luckily found our way to the Délirium Café, and said hello to our friend the Jeanneke Pis. We settled on one of the many restaurant in those pedestrian alleys, basically being "bought out" by the guy in front with 4 free beers (well, basically each restaurant has the same tactics in that area...)

Second day

The drive back was not as bad as going there since most of the snow and ice had been cleared. We arrived just before 20:00, and then it was time to relax after this intense weekend!

And to stay in all this FLOSS goodness, we held our 4th dbLUG meeting on the next Tuesday...

I attended a total 18 talks/presentations over those 2 days: 9 on Saturday and 9 on Sunday.