FOSDEM 2019

FOSDEM took place over 2 days and contained a staggering amount of talks, with over 408 hours of content and 600 speakers and 660 tshirts. All the talks are recorded and can be found on the schedule. Some of the good talks I managed to get to are below. (if the video isn’t uploaded yet sorry they try to get them up as quick as possible)

Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today? - Bradley M. Kuhn, & Karen Sandler

TL;RD; it’s hard unless you want to go to the bank every day A nice talk on what its like to try to live a full foss live and the issues you tun in to.

Blockchain: The Ethical Consideration - Deb Nicholson

Short term choices have long term consequences. In this talk, the speaker goes over considerations of the choices we are making now in cryptocurrency and what that could mean for the future. Owning 30% of nodes owns the network, what if its backed by the state, do they own the country now.

Structured Concurrency - Martin Sustrik

This was a short lighting talk, but quite fun. The speaker talks about how Go coroutines may just be the modern version of the goto and why that dangerous.

DNS over HTTPS - Daniel Stenberg

DNS is 35 years old and still in clear text. This speaker goes over the basics of what is DNS over https, as well as a few of its alternatives, and why its needed.

Netfix & FreeBSD - Jonathan Looney

Netflix talked about their CDN, Open Connect, serving 100Tb/s of traffic at peak. They discussed how they built their boxes with the shelf hardware and open source software. Using FreeBSD HEAD and commodity parts, they got 90Gb/s serving tls encrypted connections with ~55% CPU usage on 16 core 2.6 GHz CPUs.

Whats new grafana 6.0 Carl Bergquist

This was an impromptu talk that became a Q&A, lots of good questions. Grafana 6 is coming 6th of March with lots of new features, including improved panel creation, and the explore panel for looking into metrics, and improved alerting. As well a hint at what to expect in grafana 7

Critical Path Analysis - Jaana Dogani

Distributed systems are hard, and having just one person that understands them is bad. The Speaker posits that docs aren’t the answer but tooling that allows you to visualise critical paths. She goes on to talk about how such systems should be dynamic and debuggable and why this is an important problem that needs to be solved.

On Observability Observability 101 - Richard Hartmann

This is a great detailed introduction and overview of monitoring. It’s a lot of info explained very well.

Prometheus for logs - Tom Wilkie

An overview of Loki, grafanas new logging solution. It’s still in super Alpha, but the speaker covers how it works how they used Prometheus as a base, sed '%s/timeSeries/logStream/g, and the features that gives them, such as being able to use Prometheus discovery to discover logs. It even contains a demo of him using Prometheus, Loki and grafana 6 to investigate Grafana Labs production errors.

Latency SLOs done right - Heinrich Hartmann

What is an SLO and why latency matters. This talk goes into what makes a good SLO and how to calculate it. He covers a couple of ways to calculate, as well as the flaws in mosts. Good information if you’re interested in SLO.

Crostini: A Linux Desktop on ChromeOS - Guido Trotter, Dylan Reid

Google goes over some of the features of their new Linux env on ChromeOS including, native google drive support and how they built Linux on ChromeOS(Linux on Linux). Interesting tech used to provide a memory safe read-only VM for running LXD containers.

FOSDEM infrastructure review - Richard Hartmann

A review of running the conference this year, it’s short and fun when you there, you may enjoy it in review

2019 - Fifty years of Unix and Linux advances - Jon ‘maddog’ Hall

A lot has happened in tech in the last 50 year. In this talk, we take a look back at what things looked like 50 years ago and how they’ve changed in that time. This was a fun talk and a good way to end the conference