FOSDEM 2026 is a wrap! Here are my highlights.

Day 0

Attended the “Friends of Mender.io” dinner. Great catching up with old friends, and making new ones. After-party at Delirium, as is the FOSDEM tradition.

Day 1

Late start to the day as a consequence of ‘Day 0’.

Hoped to get in to the Python room, but others had the same idea and they queued up in time and I was met with a sign saying “Sorry, this room is full”. This is a very FOSDEM thing, and was expected due to my poor planning. Luckily there are video records of all talks and I hope to catch up on:

With my hopes lost of joining the Python devroom, I roamed the hallways and chatted with people instead. Which is also a very FOSDEM thing.

I do like well structured pull requests, and therefore joined Pull requests maintainers will love to review on the ‘Main Track’. Alya Abbot did a great job distilling what makes up a good pull request and how they communicate this at Zulip.

I have received several recommendations to watch How to Make Package Managers Scream (also Main Track), and I intend to! Having worked with Yocto Project and packaging a large variety of software, I fear that I have already experienced some of the horror stories.

Day 2

Day 2, I had three goals:

  1. Join the ‘Go’ devroom in the morning

    Right now involved in a ‘Go’ project, and wanted to hear about the latest and greatest in the community. The trending features are testing/synctest & Green Tea GC.

    Also enjoyed Modularizing a 10-Year Monolith: The Architecture, the People, and the Pain which has some similarities with my current project with similar conclusions, large architectural changes are about people more then tech.

  2. Join The Year in Embedded Security presentation in the ‘Embedded, Mobile and Automotive’ room

    Always enjoy talks by Marta Rybczynska, and the topic is close to heart.

  3. Watch Daniel Stenbergs (curl://) keynote

    More on this later.

Mission successful!

Lightning lightning talks

Anticipating a packed Janson room for Daniels keynote, I joined earlier to make sure I had a good spot. While waiting, there was a round of lightning talks and noted down some links that stood out to me:

Open Source Security in spite of AI

One of the highlights each year at FOSDEM is the Daniel Stenberg (curl://) keynote, and this year did not disappoint with insights on how AI is impacting open source.

Conclusion, AI is a tool which can be used for good and for bad. Open source projects are overrun by “slop” which is stealing valuable time from maintainers. “Slop” security reports are more time consuming to handle then “slop” pull requests.