Day Two - FOSDEM 2025

One can stay starved for a very long time but the moment you withdraw sleep and hydration from them, you can watch them fall apart quickly. While I could not quite claim that I was at the top of my resting game then, I did ensure that I had adequate water intake. That along with some painkillers helped me rise as early as 0600am European Standard Time on the second day of FOSDEM 2025. By the end of the previous day, I realized that I pushed my feet too much and I could use some recovery. Thankfully, I volunteered to help out with organizing the FOSDEM 2025 edition of Distributions Devroom which meant that I did not have to keep standing at our booth. After getting freshened up, I decided to skip on the breakfast on that day as I was still feeling full with the dinner meal that I had the previous night.

The other half of the reason why I did not want to overwhelm my biological system was because as one of the Distributions Devroom organizers, I had to keep myself moving. The mobility might be either to pass a microphone around to attendees when they have questions or to ensure that the decorum is maintained in the hall. Curiously enough, my fitness tracking application mentioned that I had covered somewhere around ten kilometers throughout the day. While it was mostly pacing through various buildings in the ULB Solbosch Campus, it indeed felt a lot. With no respite for my poor feet in sight then, I headed downstairs to the reception area to meet with Greg Sutcliffe and Sumantro Mukherjee. We were soon joined by Luis Bazan and Fernando Fernandez Mancera who told us that our van had arrived.

At around 0820am European Standard Time, Greg suggested that we leave for the ULB Solbosch Campus as Justin W. Flory had not arrived by the agreed upon time. As Sumantro and I were assigned the earlier slots of the Distributions Devroom organizing duty, we agreed to the decision. It was only after we boarded the van that we realized that the driver required a PIN which was available with Justin as he booked the van. Luis volunteered to reach out to him on his phone and after we heard back the PIN from a half-awake Justin, we departed for the event venue. The five of us marched up to Building K to help reestablish our booth for the second day. I risked being a bit late to the Distributions Devroom as we were weakly staffed in the morning and the booth could use some help in the setting up process.

While Fernando and Luis left to bring our supplies from the locker area, Sumantro and I worked on setting up the CentOS Project standee beside the Fedora Project standee. Tomas Hrcka who was at the booth then left with Greg for a coffee run and I decided to reach out to the Distributions Devroom's organizer discussions channel to notify them about my delay. I had to consign my coffee to Luis when I got to know that Jonathan Wright, who was also assigned the same slot with me and Sumantro was just about to leave for the event venue and was at least about at least thirty minutes out. After setting things up at our booth while Tomas and Greg were away and ensuring that we had at least four attendants present, Sumantro and I rushed to Hall H1302 in Building H for our Distributions Devroom duties.

By the time I got to the hall at around 0915am Central European Time, the first talk on Networking Booting Using Mkosi-Initrd by Antonio Alvarez Feijoo had already begun. After briefly meeting up with Shaun McCance and Benny Vasquez, I started helping out with the event photography along with the door duties while Sumantro was handling the livestream camera. After some discussion in the organizer channels, we decided to keep both doors available for usage unless the crowd was unmanageable. We had attendees joining and leaving in between but somehow the seats and doors were not as noisy as those from the hall assigned to us in the previous edition of Distributions Devroom. Jonathan soon joined us at around 0945am Central European Time and started taking care of the door duty.

After the talk on Flatcar Linux and Gentoo Linux by James Le Cuirot was over, the next talk on Rust RPM Packaging in Fedora Linux by Daniel Mellado and Mikel Olasagasti began. As Daniel planned on leaving for the airport directly from the event venue, Sumantro and I bade him farewell after the talk was finished. The two of us briefly departed from Hall H1302 to get some waffles from the foodvans in the ULB Solbosch Campus. On our way back to the hall, I met up with Carl W. George who got his talk on The Road to EPEL 10 selected due to an unplanned presentation cancellation and Julia Bley with Olaf Bley-Steglich, who were about to head back to Frankfurt. I headed back to the assigned duties after a couple of photographs with the bunch and handing over the Vakadwadi snacks to Julia.

At around 1100am Central European Time, Frantisek Lachman started with his talk on Packit on Fedora Linux and OpenSUSE Linux. While he was supposed to deliver this presentation with Dan Cermak, he had to continue by himself as Dan was unavailable. With the change of talks, the micrunning duty also changed over from Chris to me and I had to take care of making the microphone available to the audience members asking questions. Chris' act of stepping up in Justin's stead to handle the micrunning duty during his unavailability was commendable. After briefing me about the microphone toggle, he left to take care of our booth in Building K as Fernando notified in the communication channel about them being critically understaffed with only Luis and him taking care of the flagship crowd.

I soon found myself providing a similar briefing to an inexperienced yet motivated Soumyadeep Ghosh from the Ubuntu Linux community who was taking care of the emcee duty then. After clicking some photographs from Troy Dawson's talk on The SIGs of CentOS Stream at around 1145am Central European Time, I set up some time for conversations with Michael Scherer. I served some more talks as a micrunner - namely, AlmaLinux From Manul To Kitten by Andrew Lukoshko, Reproducible Builds by Jelle van der Waa, Holger Levsen and Kpcyrd, and The Road to EPEL 10 by Carl before departing for Building K. I provided Justin with my preferences when he offered to bring lunch for volunteers of Distributions Devroom and our booth while walking again through the ULB Solbosch Campus.

Michael and I shared some conversations about the situation around the use of artificial intelligence in the Fedora Project community, the introduction of a new build system and its inclusion in the established release engineering workflow, and many other things. At around 0200pm Central European Time, we came across Justin who was on his way to Building K and we were seated right in front of it. Offering Michael to Justin in exchange for a Chicken Sandwich from him, I went into Building K to check with our booth attendees. I decided to hang around for a while with Sumantro and Luis while finishing off lunch when I also met up with Jona Azizaj who had arrived then. As the clock was gradually moving towards 0300pm Central European Time, Sumantro and I decided to head back to the hall.

I would have loved to stay back at our booth but I had myself up for the emcee duty from 0300pm Central European Time onwards so I had to be present there. After catching up with the tail end of Carlos Melara's talk on Fixing CVEs on Debian, I met up with Fabian Arrotin who passed over the emcee duty to me. I started with introducing Emmanuel Rocca who was delivering a talk on Enabling Architectural Features In Debian at around 0300pm Central European Time. For presentations that were finished before the scheduled time, I made it a point to deliver some poorly written yet rollingly hilarious jokes and puzzles around GNU/Linux Distributions. It did not go badly for me doing so for the first time even though I am certain that I do not have a bright career as a standup comedian any time soon.

While the initial reception to my jokes was lukewarm, it gradually began a whole lot better once we were a couple of presentations in. At around 0330pm Central European Time, I decided to head back to take a seat after introducing Oren Klopfer and Adam Salt's talk on Rhino Linux and Pacstall as my legs were hurting again. The succeeding talk from Athos Ribeiro on The Ubuntu Patch Pilot Program faced some issues as their device was not recognizing the HDMI cable. I decided to lend my laptop for the purpose - a gesture that they were appreciative of. We also did not lose time as the previous talk finished before the decided time so there was enough time to help the speaker with the collar microphone. I took a seat with Sudhir Dharanendraiah at around 0415pm Central European Time.

In the brief conversation that I shared with Sudhir, he mentioned about how my wisecracking as an emcee helped awkward moments in between presentations as we did not have the liberty to start the next talk before the scheduled time. Even though, we were well equipped to do so - we could not compromise the audience joining, both, in-person and remotely and hence, the fillers were helpful. While Shaun took care of the micrunning duties for a previous couple of talks, I played the dual role of emcee and micrunner at the tail end of the day. Right before the last talk of the day began, I decided to finish with a programming-related puzzle about the reason why a programmer decided to keep a couple of glasses beside his bed - one empty and one full - received well by the lively audience in the hall.

As we had somewhere around ten minutes to spare before the last talk of the day began, we passed the microphone around the room for folks to answer. Amidst a bunch of mistaken answers, one person answered the puzzle correctly by stating that the purpose of the filled glass was for if the programmer was thirsty and that of the empty glass was for if the programmer was not. With a huge round of applause for the winner and for the next speaker, Jorge Gomez, talking on Understanding And Contributing To Immutable Linux Distributions at around 0430pm Central European Time - I left to purchase some waffles for the winner. As I had promised the prize to the winner, it was only fair that I honoured the arrangement by bringing waffles from the foodvans in the ULB Solbosch Campus.

In a brief interaction with Jorge, I got to know how he was using an Emacs suite as his presentation software of choice which I found to be enticing. With the last talk finishing and a round of questions being asked, it was finally the wrapping up time for the FOSDEM 2025 edition of Distributions Devroom. The lack of a closing note stung hard because that was the 25th edition of the Distributions Devroom - an occasion I considered worth observing for one of the oldest developer rooms in the history of FOSDEM. Following the conversations in our communication channels, I headed back to Building K with Sumantro where we planned on gathering together for a group photograph of the Fedora Project, CentOS Project and Red Hat attendees at FOSDEM 2025 at around 0515pm Central European Time.

After sharing some conversations with Carl, Fabian and Greg and contemplating whether folks plan to go to GitHub Maintainer Social 2025 in the evening, Greg and I decided not to wait for the shared Uber van. Like the previous evening, we realized that we could use some rest before the evening activities and thankfully, the buses were not as crowded as before. With some plans made to meet later in the lobby in the evening once we made it to the Moxy Brussels City Center hotel, Greg and I departed to our respective rooms. I got in touch with Sumantro and Sudhir to discuss the plans for meeting in the evening and we agreed upon meeting Sudhir near his hotel and taking a cab from there to Grand Place. At around 0730pm Central European Time, we met up near a metro station for a pickup.

At Grand Place, we spent roughly an hour lounging around, browsing various shops and clicking pictures with each other. The place was a lot more livelier than the last time we visited it a couple of days before when it was vacant due to the worsening drizzle. I also got some time to visit the anime shop again that I visited with Sumantro before and decided to give in to the desire to purchase all the metal plates from the Spy X Family franchise. I was lucky enough to make it there then as the store was one of the few ones open on a Sunday evening and was about to close when we entered. Sumantro and I gave a quick tour of the culture around Manga and Anime to Sudhir on our way to the Delirium Village for beers - as after all, you can never have enough of those when you visit Brussels during winter.

The three of us had a brief meeting with Artur Frenszek-Iwicki at the entrance before settling down at the back of the Delirium Cafe. With a bunch of catching up in conversations, we were soon joined by Artur again was tired of waiting on his friends. After finishing off our beers at around 0830pm Central European Time, we bade farewell to Artur and headed out looking for dinner restaurants. One funny incident that I get reminded of was the presence of haggling attendants in front of a bunch of these restaurants that we turned a deaf ear to being habituated to a similar treatment back home. While the beers did help with the cold to some extent, we had to find a restaurant quickly as the weather was growing colder by the passing second and we did not want to stay out for any longer than we had to.

Sifting through a bunch of dining places at Grand Place, we finally settled for the trustworthy Drug Opera restaurant that Sumantro and I visited a couple of years back during FOSDEM 2023. It was remarkable just how different yet similar the place felt after many years when we were seated down one level above the ground. As we were served our food, I remarked just how this place stood out to me back then because of the tricky navigation amidst multiple floors of seating. I got some Spaghetti Bolognese, while Sumantro got Fish and Chips, and Sudhir got Chicken Vol Au Vent for dinner. Among various things that we talked about, I opened up to them with the poor experience that I had the night before with the verbal dispute and I soon got to know that I was not the only one who had that experience then.

We discussed how poorly it reflected on a certain part of the community as the experience just ends up making folks feel unsafe about a certain group of people in general regardless of what their actual intentions are. As we were getting full, Sumantro offered to pay for the dinner and I heard from Michael who wanted to join us. I seemed to have gotten his message from back when we were having beers at Delirium Cafe but we soon ran into him when we were on our way out from the restaurant. Opening up to him about the previous day's situation while we were on our way to the pickup spot of our Uber cab, he suggested me to report the incident to ensure that there is a historical report of misdemeanour. With goodbyes waved and Sudhir dropped at his place, Sumantro and I were soon back at the hotel.