New blogpost:
"Reflections on my first day (ever) at FOSDEM"
I suspect that the fact that I'm hanging around my hotel room, writing this and doing other admin-y bits, rather says it all...
https://neilzone.co.uk/2026/02/reflections-on-my-first-day-ever-at-fosdem/
@neil that all sounds pretty overwhelming, which is one of the reasons I never went even if I'm from BE myself.
@neil Not having definite start & end times for talks sounds like a nightmare! Sounds unfriendly for neurodiverse ppl. Confs I've been to always have "tracks" & synchronised times so that attendees can get organised about which talks they attend. It's then possible to see the video afterwards for the ones you missed.
@neil As someone that loves the complete chaos of the event I understand your reflections and wish you the best.
To me it works kinda of a relief from the complete structured, organized and closed source that I usually had on my daily work.
@neil also my first; agreed on many counts. It some rooms it felt like the heating was set super high where none was needed
@annehargreaves I guess that it must suit some people, as it has been running a long time, and I am just a first time attendee!
@neil it was lovely to finally meet you in person. I was entertained by your apparent fan club too!
@Synchro Yes, a pleasure to finally meet you away from keyboard!
@neil Your experience aligns with mine from more than 10 years ago. The absolute crush of people was overwhelming, for me. Some of my colleagues at the time were totally into it and energised. I never went back, despite feeling it was and still is very relevant to my interests.
@neil I feel the same way, which is why I've never been to Fosdem (I like the idea, but there are far too many people, I prefer max 150 as it feels more like a community and I can talk to everyone if I want to). A good example of 'victim of its own success'.
@neil that was an interesting write up. My plans to attend have been thwarted for two years running. But perhaps that was for the best, I do not cope well with crowded places, that's why I rarely visit London. ( or even my nearest city Nottingham for that matter).
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Thank you for sharing. Your post was a good reminder to me that its ok and normal to have those types of feelings about events, and I dont have to follow the expected social script.
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@neil I had pretty much the same experience last year. I don't want to go back.
And as for watching the streams, there are often problems. Just earlier today, for instance, all audio stopped working. Of course, since there's no A/V people in the devrooms, no one told the presenters. A cooperation with https://media.ccc.de/ perhaps?
My experience last year:
@mc Oh, interesting - that's a shame about the live stream, but I guess that that is just a side effect of volunteers doing their best.
@jmtd I decided to head there anyway, so I will see what it is like in a few minutes!
I haven’t been to FOSDEM for ages, so some of this may have changed:
The first year I went, there were about 3,000 people. It felt enormous. The beer event on the Friday was packed, but we did get a table after about an hour (and then stayed until 6:30am). A lot of people who had used code found me (and bought me beer, which contributed to the late night). I went to some talks, but mostly it was an event to chat to people. The talks I went to were interesting but were mostly they were useful because each talk would be attended by 20-50 people who were interested in the topic and talking to them was useful. Often they didn’t actually attend the talk: arriving a bit late and not being able to get into the room would leave you surrounded by half a dozen or so people who were also working on the thing the talk was about, going to have coffee with those people was often more interesting than the talk (talks are less interactive and you can always see the recordings later).
I gave a in track talks a few times (at least two, possibly three? I lose track). This is definitely worth doing because of the breakfasts. Main track speakers are put up in the Novotel on the Grand Place and so they all go to the same breakfast. I had breakfast with Chris Lattner one year. With Simon Cozens (who had just given a talk about his new typesetter, SILE, a project I would have created if I’d had time and was super happy to see someone else doing) another.
The busiest year, I gave four talks (one main track, three dev room). This was the first year they expanded to the buildings that were a bit further away, and also the year it snowed and the temperature dropped to minus ten. It took several years for the skin in my nose to recover from waiting half an hour in that temperature for a taxi. Walking over the ice between the rooms was difficult. Not my favourite year, for several reasons.
The dev rooms are not really organised centrally in any meaningful way. It’s better to think of FOSDEM as a set of colocated federated conferences than one big one. Some dev rooms focus entirely on talks, some use it as more of a hackathon, a lot are somewhere in the middle. There’s no coordination of schedules because they’re really independent events that happen to be next to each other. You can walk between them easily, which is nice if you want to got to more than one, but you often get the most value by spending half a day or a day in a single dev room, especially one that isn’t back-to-back talks.
After the first couple of years, I mostly skipped dev room talks. I went to a few of the main track ones, but spent most of the time focused on talking to the other attendees.
I was definitely peopled out by the end of yesterday.
And yet the people were also the best bit...
@neil I think you captured the experience in your post. Remember to rest and recover, its an intense event.
My first FOSDEM was 2015, I presented in 2020. The crowds really are overwhelming. Presenting at FOSDEM and knowing folks makes a huge difference. But I wouldn't attend now.
@anna wrote about their experience last year:
https://notapplicable.dev/daring-to-dream/
I really liked their references to systems design and came away with a book recommendation, that I need to get.
@neil When you said you were planning on going, my thought was that it would be far too crowded and far too much booze for your liking.
@mansr Oh, I avoided all the alcohol events :)
But you were right about crowds.
@neil Oh wow this saddens me immensely to hear. My takeaways would likely have been the same as yours it seems.
It can be incredibly hard as an organizer to say no, but that does seem to be what has been the problem here. The number of attendees need to match the venue size, and scheduling talks properly is much more important than total talk throughput.
Thank you for your writeup.
@neil Sounds like it hasn't changed much since the times I went there, in the early '00s.
People getting up and leaving as soon as the Q&A started was the most annoying thing for me. This is not how conferences are meant to happen, and I find it incredibly rude.
The SF cons I've been to have all scheduled 1h talks with 30m between, so you get time for a breather.
The academic ones have usually been more tightly packed, but with, say, 2-3 closely themed talks/session.
@neil I've not been to FOSDEM, and I've not been to any conferences since COVID; but generally I had a few hour tolerance for them - enjoy looking at things, meeting people for a bit; and then I'm out of braincells and that's enough thanks. The actual watching people present is often the most boring part as well.
@neil @annehargreaves indeed.. your findings essentially match my experiences from when I used to go regularly about, umm, twenty years ago. I liked a lot of aspects of it but mostly went to chat to people
I tend to agree, the stalls are hideously crowded, the acoustics of _everywhere_ are terrible (I popped on my AirPods on the voice enhancement mode in a couple of talks). Masks essential.
That said, I still go most years, my strategy is to stay in a devroom for half a day - so I watch random talks rather than micro targeting -exact- ones. This is a lot less stressful - and often fascinating.
Plus fact that I'm bound to run into folks I haven't seen for ages and swap gossip.
Also my first FOSDEM & I feel similarly. I did enjoy giving my talk though, as it was nice to answer some audience questions.
@lolaodelola Oh, drat, I'm sorry I didn't get to meet you :(
No worries! I hope your talk went well, considering the circumstances
@neil my experience of FOSDEM (an most conferences honestly) is that if you want to follow the conferences you are better at home watching a stream or recording. When I go to FOSDEM it’s mostly to meet in person with dozens of people over 3-4 day who all happen to be in Brussels at the same time. There are some nice spots to have a quiet-ish discussion around, but they may not be well indicated.
@renchap That sounds like a very sensible approach!
I had a few quiet chats, but they were all outside - I felt that we were lucky with the weather!
Huh. For many years, I had always felt like I was missing out on FOSDEM, but based on your descriptions, I would probably have many of the same frustrations. So thanks for your honest review!
In recent years, I have focused on local and regional conferences; I am pretty much just done with long-distance travel.
Even if a conference has a strong masking policy (which is fast approaching 0), just getting to a faraway conference is too much risk for me to consider.
Thanks for the write up - a few years ago after a particularly meh conference experience I sat down to come up with a set of criteria that any future conference would have to meet before I would consider attending/speaking - these kinds of logs are very useful when making such decisions.
@neil
I've gone about 10 times in the last 20 years (not this time - sorry to have missed you). My experience matches yours mostly, although I've normally found the wifi pretty good. Agree, too busy and too hot though. Absolutely hate the stampede as soon as Q&A is mentioned making Q&A time pointless.
It helps if I accept I need a big gap between talks to get anywhere and adjust expectations accordingly. Sometimes even then need to camp out in a popular devroom.
@neil
Brussels city centre being pretty small, it's feasible to do a lot of meet-ups after the event is done for the day. Some arrive a day or more early just for this. There's a lot of extra side events that tag on to the start or end of FOSDEM dates as well, for this reason - many people already happen to be there together.
I will probably go again but it takes a lot out of me!
@neil My experience differed from yours a little, I can only assume because we picked different devrooms. Not once did people leave before Q&A had finished, and the devrooms I was in did program 5-10min gaps between their talks for movement. I think each devroom is run (schedule as well as people management) by whomever set it up.
@castaway Ah, interesting - others have said that it is really like a multitude of parallel events, each with their own approach, so yes, I guess that different rooms could mean very different experiences.