A small Fosdem wrapup

The other weekend I was in Brussels for FOSDEM. As you know, this year we had a Mono room on sunday, thanks to the amazing efforts of Ruben Vermeersch and Stéphane Delcroix. The conference was great, as it always is, although as usual as didn’t get to see much of the talks on saturday - busy preparing my own talk about Moonlight, and meeting people, which is one of the parts I enjoy most at FOSDEM. Sunday was awesome, full of Mono talks in a nicely packed room. People were very interested, we had great feedback, and everything went very well, including my demos - it was a very good day, and all in all, a great event. On monday we had a special Mono hackday, where we got together and, well, hacked. I sat down with Lucas Meijer of Unity and we went through some of the issues they have embedding Mono, similar to what Moonlight has to do. Lucas decided to stay an extra day just for the Mono hackday, after a lot of chatting and quite a few beers the day before, and I’m so glad he did, it was a very productive, if somewhat short, day.

Over the three days of the event I had the pleasure of meeting, remeeting and chatting with a lot of wonderful people, whom I usually only get to talk to online - Jo Shields, Mirco Bauer, Alan McGovern, Jeremie Laval, Jim Purbrick, Michael Meeks, Mans Rullgard, David “Lefty” Schlesinger, Rob Taylor, Bertrand Lorentz, Massimiliano Mantione, just to name a few and not in any particular order (I just know I forgot a ton of people!). Also got to meet a bunch of portuguese people, like Vânia Gonçalves, Miguel Azevedo, Paulo Trezentos and more - some of them I only get to see at FOSDEM these days, for some odd reason… weird country this is :)

All in all, it was great, I missed the interaction and the chats and the dinners and the talks and the general merryness and learning that is to be had when you’re surrounded by a thousand geeks. I hope to see you all again soon!

PS: I somehow got Jérémie’s name confused with a known beer brand… which might, or might not be, a good sign! Fixed… :)