synyx at the FOSDEM 2017

As a part of our annual budget we decided to visit the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM).

 
What is FOSDEM?
It’s is a free, community-driven developer event at the ULB Solbosch Campus, Brussel. It was first held in 2001 and has since been growing. Besides the main track where speakers can introduce their projects or hold talks in separate rooms there were a bunch of developer rooms, workshops and certification possibilities.
As an sysadmin trainee I found myself enjoying all this new input on my first business trip. All of the speakers I talked to were very open and helpful.
Some of the most interesting talks I’ve attended were:
Daniel Stenberg held an interesting and funny talk about the history of curl and how it became such an important tool. He also talked about the future of the projects, problems and risks.
Link to the talk.
Vesna Manojlovic, Community Builder at RIPE NCC, talked about Ethics in Network Measurements. She explained why the field is political and how we should act to keep the internet, programming and technology ethically sound.  In my opinion one of the talks everybody in IT should see.
Link to the talk.
Hanno Böcks talk “Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10?” examined the vulnerabilities of the Linux Desktop and how the Super Mario soundtrack can own your system. Besides the possible attack points he talked about ways to fix it and asked the community to help.
Link to the talk.
Andrew Savchenko gave a gentle overview of “Quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography”. The risk for our cryptography and how we can possibly safely encrypt data in the future. As an interesting talk about a very complicated topic, the “gentle overview” turned out to be very complex.
Link to the talk.
There were many more talks on various topics including some interesting lightning talks I invite you to explore and discuss, found here.
 
I’d like to thank everybody involved in the FOSDEM organization, speakers, synyx and my coworkers who also went there.
Can’t wait for the next FOSDEM in 2018 with you!