FOSDEM 2023

Posted Feb 07, 2023 🞲 Updated Feb 13, 2023

FOSDEM 2023

I just arrived from FOSDEM 2023 and I wanted to write a bit about the presentations I liked, and some notes I took during the weekend.

Most of these talks are (or will eventually be) available on the FOSDEM website, but they can also be found more conveniently organized at https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/download/tables/fosdem/.

Favorites

Matrix 2.0

There were a lot of good presentations, but to me this one was the highlight of the conference. I haven’t used Matrix lately, so it started a little bit slow for me. However, once Matthew Hodgson started to do demo after demo of all the new features and improvements they’re working on, it was mind-blowing to say the least. I will not spoil the ending, but I highly recommend to watch it through the end.

Application Monitoring with Grafana and OpenTelemetry

This presentation by Fabian Stäber probably was the one that most closely relates to my current job. I was not aware of how many features Grafana provides (specially the ability to see traces and logs), and how they integrate so well together. My favorite part was when he showed a graph with the 99th and 50th response time percentiles, and how you could overlay traces on the same graph, for quick access to sample problematic requests (min. 22:20).

How To Automate Documentation Workflow For Developers

I learn a lot from this presentation by Portia Burton. I guess I had never given too much thought on how to properly write technical documentation. I learned a bit on how to think about your “voice” and “tone”, and about the Markdown linter Vale. This is surely something I’ll see if I can apply to these notes.

data mountains - turn your data into mountains!

I hadn’t plan to come to this one, but since I had some free time I went to the Lighting Talks. I’m glad I did, and got to see this short but interesting talk about data visualization by @joeldn. It made me want to visit London and do a bit of data visualization myself.

For the next time

Other talks I saw

Talks I couldn’t attend

And which I’ll probably work my way over the weekends.

Random notes