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Author: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2026 19:30:33 +0100
FOSDEM blog post
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+# FOSDEM 2026
+
+On January 31st and February 1st I went to [FOSDEM](https://fosdem.org),
+the largest Open Source Software conference in the World. It happens every
+year in Brussels, only a couple of hours of train away from where I live.
+This is actually the second time I go: I was there in 2024 too.
+
+If you have never been to FOSDEM, you may not know about the sheer size
+of the thing. To give you an idea, this year there were around 1200
+speakers. Yes, you read it right, not *attendees*, but *speakers*.
+This means more than a thousand talks over the course of two days.
+
+Obviously, talks are divided into tracks (called *dev rooms*),
+and people move around from one to the other, hoplessly trying to attend
+all the talks they interested in. Besides the talks, there are also
+[community gatherings](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/bof/),
+[lightning talks](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/dev-random/),
+activities for children and so on.
+
+Some people say FOSDEM is also a great place to socialize with like-minded
+people, but I am not good at that. Unless sitting next to each other in
+complete silence counts at socializing - in that case I am the master
+of socializing!
+
+Anyways, here is a short summary of my experience at FOSDEM 2026. If
+you are interested in any of the talks I mention in this post, follow
+the links I provide to watch the videos - those that have not already
+been uploaded will be in a matter of days.
+
+## Saturday
+
+Eager not to miss any talk, I took the first train to Brussels on Saturday
+morning. I arrived to the city very early, so I decided to walk the ~4.5km
+from the station to the university campus where FOSDEM takes place,
+and I was still well in time for the first talk. It was quite warm for
+the end of January.
+
+### Welcome to FOSDEM
+
+I went to plenary
+[introduction](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SFKNTZ-welcome_to_fosdem_2026/)
+where the organizers give some practical information about the conference.
+Besides that, the speaker gave a rather political speach, where he talked
+about the importance of Open Source software in preserving democracy in
+current times. It was clearly very important to him, as he got emotional
+during the short speech; but the crowd was supportive.
+
+### FOSS on mobile devices
+
+After the introduction I went straight to the [FOSS on mobile dev
+room](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/foss-on-mobile/).
+The first talk was entitled ["The state of FOSS on
+mobile"](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SW83YJ-state_of_foss_on_mobile/)
+and, from what I gathered from this mornings talk, it could be summarized
+with three words: very, very sad. At least on the Android side of
+things: Google is making Android harder to work with for the open source
+community, by developing it behind closed doors and releasing updates
+only twice a year. The other talks described how [huge Android's code
+base is](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/9DRDS7-deep-dive-aosp/)
+(1.7TB, if you are curious), how hard it is to [port to other
+architectures](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SXX8HE-open_source_risc-v_aosp_porting_progress_challenges_and_upstream_work/)
+and why it is [so slow to build
+it](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/KX88W8-aosp-build/). Oh and
+Android apps are going the Apple way and it may soon not be possible to
+install them unless the developer officially received Google's blessing.
+
+I wanted to follow also a couple of talks in the afternoon
+about *mainline* Linux distributions for phones, such as
+[PostmarketOS](https://postmarketos.org/), but the room was full so I
+had to skip those. Hopefully things are going better on that front.
+
+### Hare community meetup
+
+After a short break that I spent "socializing"
+(eavesdropping random conversations while passing by groups
+of people counts, right?), I decided to join the [Hare community
+meetup](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/EKCFEH-hare_community_meetup/).
+In case you have never heard of it, [Hare](https://harelang.org/) is
+a currently in-development programming language initially created by
+[Drew Devault](https://drewdevault.com/).
+
+I share a lot of ideas about what a programming language should
+be like with the creators of Hare, and I am eagerly waiting
+for the 1.0 release with its promised perpetual backwards
+compatibility. Apart from this, my relationship with the Hare
+community so far consists in having attended the [announcement
+talk](https://harelang.org/blog/2022-04-25-announcing-hare/) back in 2022,
+having read the [specification](https://harelang.org/specification/) once
+and sent a patch for a couple of typos, and now joining this community
+meetup. That's it.
+
+The gathering lasted a little less than an hour and lots of
+topics were briefly discussed, including some comparison with
+[Zig](https://ziglang.org/).
+
+I you want to see some Hare code, some time ago I
+implemented a very simple (and very ugly) [minesweeper
+clone](https://git.tronto.net/minesweeper) with it (using
+[raylib](https://www.raylib.com/).
+
+### Python
+
+After the meetup I went to the Python dev room. I am currently working
+with Python at my daily job, so I thought this could be useful.
+
+I was there in time to attend [a talk on lazy
+imports](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/HAAABD-the_bakery_how_pep810_sped_up_my_bread_operations_business/)
+and one on the [GIL
+removal](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/ABJMWD-the_gil_and_api_performance_past_present_and_free-threaded_future/).
+Both were quite interesting. I wanted to follow also [the next
+one](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/WE7NHM-modern-python-monorepo-apache-airflow/),
+but the room was way too hot for me, so I ran out and took another
+break.
+
+### How to make package managers scream
+
+[This](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DCAVDC-how_to_make_package_managers_scream/)
+was a fun one. It was a tongue-in-cheek talk about all the things
+developers do that make life hard for "package managers", i.e. people
+that install and maintain software installations for other people. I
+enjoyed it.
+
+### gotwebd
+
+Quite late in the day, at 18:15, there was [a
+talk](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/K7YXFT-gotweb/) I was
+very interested in. It was about [`got`](https://gameoftrees.org/), a
+version control system compatible with git repositories, develop by some
+[OpenBSD](https://www.openbsd.org/) people, and in particular about its
+web server deamon, `gotwebd`.
+
+Just a couple of months ago I started looking into alternative ways
+to [host my git pages](../2022-11-23-git-host). I started configuring
+[cgit](https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/) (and at some point I'll finish the
+work and write about it here), but I experienced some inconveniencies
+when working with OpenBSD's httpd chroot. Since `got` is developed mainly
+for OpenBSD, its web server should integrate quite well with the OS.
+
+I am glad I went to this talk in the end, it motivated me to try out
+`gotwebd`. And I managed to get back to the hotel in time to have dinner
+with some colleagues of mine.
+
+## Sunday
+
+After drinking a couple of beers at [Delirium
+Village](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_Caf%C3%A9), sleeping
+decently well and eating *like a pig* at the hotel's buffet breakfast,
+I once again walked to the campus. Yes, I walked a lot this weekend.
+
+My plan for the day was to split my time between the [Software
+Performance](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/software-performance/)
+and the [Rust](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/rust/) dev rooms,
+and closing the day with the last 2 or 3 main track talks.
+
+Walking back and forth between rooms is not ideal because you end up
+wasting a lot of time queuing and you risk missing talks if the room
+is full. Luckily for me, it worked out, also thanks to the fact that
+the Rust room was *huge*.
+
+### Software Performance
+
+In this room there was a good mix of talks about different aspects of
+software performance: some talks were about low-level optimizations you
+can make to your code, others about benchmarking, and others about how
+to make your overengineered Kubernetes mess suck a bit less - these may
+not be the exact words used by the speakers, I have not followed any
+talk on overengineered Kubernetes messes.
+
+[The first
+talk](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/TYX3FF-accessible_software_performance/)
+was in part an introduction to the room and in part an
+overview of some compile-time optimization techniques, such as
+[PGO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile-guided_optimization) and
+[LTO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interprocedural_optimization).
+
+I came back to this room later in the
+morning for [a talk about measuring performance
+reliably](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/8AS3XD-how-to-reliably-measure-software-performance/).
+I was afraid I would miss it because the room was so full, but I managed
+to sneak in, even though I had to stand during the talk. In short, it was
+a really nice talk, and I learnt a couple of tricks to make benchmarks
+more consistent and reproducible.
+
+Then, in the afternoon, I attended
+a talk about [writing a fast JSON parser in
+LUA](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/MFPHVE-ultrafast-lua-json-parsing/)
+and another about
+[`memcpy()`](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PAXHDR-memcpy/).
+Both were nice, especially the latter, and they were precisely about the
+kind of low-level optimization stuff that I enjoy playing with recently.
+
+### Rust
+
+The Rust dev room was, as I expected, quite popular. But the organizers
+wisely assigned it to a very large conference room, so nobody was stopped
+from attending, as far as I know.
+
+In the morning I saw a guy [talking
+about](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/W3UFSK-rust-game-boy/)
+how he wanted to write GameBoy games in Rust,
+but the GameBoy's custom CPU is not supported by
+[rustc](https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/what-is-rustc.html), so he had
+to write a compiler first. Pretty cool!
+
+I came back to this room in the afternoon for two back-to-back talks. [The
+first](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/RCFALN-rust-building-performance-critical-python-apps/)
+was by someone who wanted to speed up their Python code base, and they
+ended up replacing some default Python tools with Rust-based alternatives
+- not because they necessarilly wanted to use Rust-based stuff, but
+because they turned out to be the most performant.
+
+[The last rusty
+talk](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/GWRDNT-rust-type-checking-python/)
+I attended was about [ty](https://docs.astral.sh/ty/), a type-checker for
+Python that I will probably start using at work soon - and I am already
+using other tools by the same developers. The talk went quite deep into
+the details of the implementation. I would have preferred if they told
+us a bit more about what the tool does instead, but this was the Rust
+dev room after all, not the Python one.
+
+### Lightning lightning talks
+
+Later in the day, I was back in the main track
+room in time for the second [Lightning Lightning
+Talks](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/G3ZWYU-lightning_lightning_talks_2/)
+session. Every speaker was given 256 seconds to present. I
+was expecting the talks to be humorous, but actually most of
+them were a bit boring. Shout out to the speakers who talked
+about [smart TVs](https://runxiyu.org/), the [PostgreSQL Compatibility
+Index](https://drunkdba.medium.com/postgresql-compatibility-index-the-fellowship-of-the-database-4005f818f97c)
+and [rendering windows in a terminal](https://github.com/dextero/smithay),
+I found these ones very entertaining!
+
+### Open Source security in spite of AI
+
+[Daniel Stenberg](https://daniel.haxx.se/), creator
+and maintainer of [`curl`](https://curl.se/), gave the
+final keynote talk, entitled [Open Source Security in Spite of
+AI](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/B7YKQ7-oss-in-spite-of-ai/). He
+presented his experience with AI, both the good and the ugly: he talked
+about how slop spam forced him to close `curl`'s bug bounty program, but
+also about the LLM-based code analysis tools that are helping him improve
+the code. I highly recommend you watch the video if you want to know more.
+
+I had already heard about the spam issues he was facing, so the part
+about the useful AI tools was the most interesting for me. Normally when
+I read comments on Hacker News or otherwise hear developers claiming that
+<s>copy paste bots</s> AI coding tools can produce great code with little
+supervision, I am very skeptical. My experience with these tools is that
+they produce horrible code that is at best usable for throwaway scripts
+that you are never going to look at again. But this talk was different,
+it made complete sense. It makes sense that LLMs can compare your code
+with the documentation and find inconsistencies. It makes sense that they
+can guess edge cases that you forgot about. And it makes sense that they
+make up inexistent vulnerabilities when asked to.
+
+### Closing FOSDEM
+
+After the closing talk I walked back to the station. I am now typing this
+post on the train. I guess this is part of the FOSDEM weekend too, right?
+
+## Miscellanea
+
+I'll conclude this post with a list of random things that I could not fit
+above. I'll do this in everyone's favorite literary style: an LLM-style
+bullet point list.
+
+*Sure! Here is a list of topics that have not been mentioned in this
+post so far:*
+
+* **Plan ahead:** I enjoyed this edition of FOSDEM more than the 2024
+one, because I planned more carefully which talks I wanted to watch,
+which backups I could attend if I changed my mind last minute, and when
+to take breaks.
+* **Laptop charging:** After using my laptop on the train and during the
+talk, it was below 30% by 12:00. It was hard to find a place to plug it
+in, so I ended up sitting on the floor in a corrdidor next to a power
+outlet. Next time I should use pen and paper to take notes instead.
+* **Physical exercise:** I walked at least 20km during the weekend,
+not including moving from one dev room to the other between talks.
+I could have used public transport more, but I enjoy walking.
+* **Feeling motivated:** The performance-related
+talks motivated me to continue improving my [Rubik's cube
+solver](../2026-01-28-prefetch/). Maybe I'll start working on that
+*microthreading* thing sooner rather than later!
+* **Website improvements:** I should support
+[IPv6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6) on my website. That should
+be as easy as adding one configuration line in my host name records,
+but I have never bothered so far. But now I'll have to, because next
+year the FOSDEM public wifi won't support IPv4 anymore! my website was
+not reachable with the main FOSDEM wifi, and next year it is going to
+be IPv6 only.
