20 Years of FOSDEM
FOSDEM, an annual conference to promote the widespread use of free and open source software, is now in its 20th year. Its scope is breathtaking: it takes over an entire university campus in Brussels for two days. Last week saw 871 events spread across 71 tracks.

FOSDEM, an annual conference to promote the widespread use of free and open source software, is now in its 20th year. Its scope is breathtaking: it takes over an entire university campus in Brussels for two days. Last week saw 871 events spread across 71 tracks. Weaveworkers Bryan Boreham (@bboreham) and Stefan Prodan (@stefanprodan) were in attendance, and in this post, they discuss some of the more interesting talks and trends from the show.
Taking continuous delivery a step further
Since Weaveworks pioneered GitOps, it was exciting to hear in the talk, "Releasing Software with GitOps", how Sean McGinnis of Dell, applies it to a slightly different area. Here a dedicated “releases” git repo is used to manage the assembly of artefacts from multiple sources that then gets distributed to multiple destinations.
Progressive delivery has also taken off as the next evolutionary step of continuous delivery. At the CI/CD track, there were two excellent talks about Kubernetes deployment strategies and progressive delivery techniques featuring JenkinsX and our very own Flagger:
- Choosing the Right Deployment Strategy by Viktor Farcic
- Progressive Delivery by Carlos Sanchez
Other talks worth checking out
If you are into open source you should definitely watch James Bottomley talk “The Selfish Contributor Explained”
Anyone building software for production should also follow a few instrumenting tips from Bartek and Kemal.
A demo of integrating tracing with Grafana may also point the way for the future of observability.
The State of Go talk is a repeat of Google’s own material, but delivered in an entertaining style by Francesc and Maartje.
Lastly, if you have any questions about Weave Net you may find some answers in Bryan Boreham's talk, “Weave Net, an Open Source Container Network - Five years with no central point of control.”
Every session gets recorded, and with the awesome automated editing and transcoding software available means that most of the videos are already posted online. Take a look through these tracks and watch a couple - most are quite short:
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