The Trip
FOSDEM is one of the largest open source conventions out there, it’s been tradition for CompSoc to travel there each year for a while now and this year was no different. We started organising mid October and by the time the trip came round we had 29 people ready to go, essentially twice the number compared to last year.
We split across two hostels, Sleep Well and Condo Gardens. Both relatively central. These two groups stayed apart for most of the trip, each ran by two or so committee members, making organisation a lot easier.
Days
Day one was spent travelling from the University, the computing department paid for a coach to Manchester airport and from there we flew to Brussels arriving for 9am (having left at 1am!). We had a whole day free so explored The Atomium, ate food and rested. The Atomium had a jaw-dropping light show inside which kept a lot of us in there for almost an hour.
Next two days followed with FOSDEM itself, this involved talks, stalls and socialising, with days ending with resting in delurium for some and tourism for others. The talks students went to ranged from low-level compiler and kernel work to higher level web or python work. Students spent most of their time in talks on
- Mobile Development
- Emulation
- GCC and its inner workings
- Archiving and data storage
- Embedded systems programming and hardware
A number of students spent full days in one room, watching all the talks on a set subject they were interested in learning more about, this was true for Mobile Development and Emulation.
Day four left us with a free day for exploring, students went to museums, shopping centres and park. Two groups organised to take part in escape rooms and another travelled to a car museum. We then slept relatively early for a 5am journey home.
Notes for next year
- Wolf Food Sharing Market is somewhere worth considering for food, they could reserve for 30 and have a large range of food types for all dietary requirements
- The housing this year was almost perfect, being very central and no more than a 20 minute journey to anywhere we went