FOSDEM 2009

I went to FOSDEM on Sunday. I got up at 6 AM but went to bed at 2 AM (because I still had to review my presentation) … so I only had 4 hours of sleep! I met up with Jo Vermeulen and Tim Dupont at 7 AM in Hasselt’s station. Jo is a PhD student and Tim is a teaching assistant at Hasselt University.
I hesitated at first because both of them have teached me a course either this year or last year, so it’d be a bit weird. But getting to know people is virtually always more fun than pain, so what the heck, I traveled with them anyway!

The highlight of the day for me was of course the big challenge I had posed myself: my own presentation, “Improving Drupal’s page loading performance”, because it was my first ever! I was going to speak to 150 people, in English, after Dries!
Fortunately, I’ve managed to learn over the past few weeks how to control myself, that’s why I had zero stress at my oral exams (one of which was graded by Jo, funny enough :P) so I should be able to do the same on stage! And it worked, I only was slightly nervous. And apparently it showed: many people congratulated me afterwards because it was interesting and apparently well-presented!
I still think I said “eh” too much and mispronounced too often, but it turns out it wasn’t very noticeable. I’ll try to improve upon those things next time.

I’m very glad that it went so well and thanks for all the positive feedback! I spent more than 2 full days preparing the presentation and it was definitely worth it :) It seems that my decision to not do a live demo but record a screen cast instead, was a wise one because Emma seems to be planning to do the same in the future.

If you’d like to find out about all the details of my talk and lots of extra information, then look at this page on my web site.

Unfortunately, I found FOSDEM itself a bit disappointing. If Jo & Tim hadn’t been there, I’d probably have been bored most of the day. They were there last year as well and they too found it underwhelming, with less interesting sessions and more bad presenters than last year.
There was only one Drupal session that really interested me personally, because most sessions were aimed at new Drupal users. The one that interested me, Moving Content from Staging to Live Server, was disappointing because it didn’t offer a generic solution. If Neil Drumm’s session would still have been about the Job queue module, then I’d have gone to that one as well — it was changed a couple of days ago.
So I went to some non-Drupal sessions with Jo & Tim: Pragmatic Smalltalk at which the presenter didn’t show up, so somebody else did it in his place. It was messy and we’d expected it to be more about Sqeak, whereas in reality it was more about implementation details. After that we went to a Wt:Ruby session, which was extremely badly presented: too many bullets on his slides and he seemed to be talking about something else than the slides’ contents… Finally we went to a session about Upstart, which is something like launchd on Mac OS X for Linux. This was in the Janson room – the biggest room, about 3 times the size of the biggest auditorium at Hasselt University — and unfortunately 90% of what the presenter was saying was not understandable.

In the end it was a very pleasant and interesting day, but mostly thanks to the interesting conversations I had with Jo & Tim, not thanks to interesting presentations at FOSDEM. Let’s hope next year is better!