FOSDEM 2024

Last week 40+ Codethings descended upon Brussels for FOSDEM 2024, along with thousands of members of the Free & Open Source Software community. Between us we attended many great talks, delivered a well-received talk in the open hardware room, took part in some volunteering and ate many delicious Liège waffles.

What is FOSDEM?

FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial two day event organised by volunteers to promote and discuss the widespread and free use of free and open source software. The event provides the perfect place for software developers and the open source community to meet and work towards a number of goals. You can learn more about these goals at https://fosdem.org.

The Event

Codethink once again was proud to have sponsored FOSDEM 2024. We always get a lot of benefit from attending, and we also see it as a very important event for many Free and Open Source Software communities as a place to meet.

The team were able to network with the wider open source commmunity as well as take the time to attend a wide range of technical topics and learn about the existance of new and improved technologies.

To give you a flavour of some of the talks, some of the sessions attended included:

• Where have the women of tech history gone?
• Take your FOSS project from surviving to thriving
• So you think you know Git
• Friend or Foe Inside? Exploring In-Process Isolation to Maintain Memory Safety for Unsafe Rust
• Outreachy: 1000 interns
• The Regulators Are Coming: One Year On

With such a broad range of topics, there really was something for all Codethings to benefit from.

One of our newest engineers, Roan Richmond, told us: "FOSDEM is a welcoming community of very passionate individuals all meeting up to talk about their favourite projects, many of which, they contribute to outside and on top of their full time work."

As well as attending talks, a few of our team contributed to the event with a talk of their own: "Testing in a Box: Streamlining Embedded System Testing".

The talk covered:

• End-to-end software integration testing
• Testing on hardware
• Building a robust software infrastructure

The talk took place in the open hardware devroom. We'd like to thank the organisers for selecting our talk.

The talk was well received and sparked some interesting conversations. If you'd like to see the talk for yourself or view the slides you can find them here

FOSDEM is a great event for anyone who would like to know more about or get involved in the free and opensource (FOSS) communities. If you've not attended before, we'd recommend it.

If you'd like to learn more about the events Codethink attend, please check out our events page.