It’s that time of the year again— FOSDEM is coming up next weekend in Brussels February 3-4, 2018. FOSDEM stands for Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting. It’s an annual event that has gained popularity over the last few years and is widely recognized as one of the best open source conferences in Europe. Every year it’s held the first weekend of February at the campuses of ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles).
At FOSDEM there are a lot of different topics, technologies and developers from all over the world. Everyone gets together to share their ideas and experiences with each other. The FOSDEM crew itself organizes a couple of “main track” topics presented by their own speakers. These presentations are intended for a broad audience and are held in the largest auditoriums of the university campus.
Alongside the main tracks each open-source related community, movement or product can request their own “developer room” or devroom. As such, the MySQL community has been a long-term contributor to this event, and we have had our own devroom for many years now, the MySQL and Friends devroom. The last couple of years Frédéric “lefred” Descamps has been the room manager and the driving force behind getting the room on the FOSDEM agenda and assembling a committee of MySQL community members that select the best possible content not only for MySQL community members but for the full range of FOSDEM attendees.
This year it is my privilege to represent Pythian on the MySQL and Friends committee and as such I helped to review the 76 (!) submissions that we received and reduced to a lineup of only 16 talks. It was almost impossible to choose only 16 talks from so many excellent submissions. I would like to thank everyone that submitted this year and I encourage you all to keep doing so even if your presentation didn’t make it this year. Don’t be discouraged, please keep in mind that we only had 16 slots to fill.
For the second year in a row now Oracle’s MySQL Community Team is organizing a pre-FOSDEM MySQL day where they will continue to showcase their community engagement and continue to promote the upcoming version of MySQL 8.0. Next to their own Oracle speakers, they have invited a number of longtime community members to talk about their use cases and about 8.0. The pre-FOSDEM MySQL day is free, but registration is required. Unfortunately at the time of writing this, the event is already sold out.
Last, but not least, on the same day as the pre-FOSDEM MySQL day there is a MySQL and Friends community dinner. The party-squad prepares a selection of Belgian beer and food. Tickets for this event are still available! Get them before they sell out.
So get ready to join us in Brussels and look for the “Love Your Data” t-shirts! See you there! And for those who can not make it to Brussels, check out the FOSDEM website where sessions are live streamed and you don’t have to miss anything.
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