Hurray, I’m finally going to Brussels for the Fosdem conference 🎉🚁. I will be not so live blogging when I’m not drinking Belgian beer or eating fries with 5 types of sauce. I’ve prepared myself by reading through the n-gate.com schedule, laughing at engineers who want laugh because Golang does not support generics.

Day 0

Beer is a way of life in Belgium and Belgians take pride of it. The Friday evening page has the details about what happens the night before the conference.

Day 1

I’ll be listing the names of presentations I enjoyed together with some opinions. If you want to watch them, they’ll be available several days later on the Fosdem website.

Performance Analysis and Troubleshooting Methodologies for Databases

The CEO of Percona did this talk. He carefully chose the humor to appeal to both developers and systems engineers.

if databases go wrong, then handwave and call a DBA

He did a broad description of different monitoring approaches in the context of databases, but you’d have to search for yourself for concrete recipes. Oh, and he used the term SLO correctly 🤗.

Creating GopherJS Apps with gRPC-Web

People are getting excited about Golang, possibly overly excited. A developer decided that they hated Javascript a lot, that a suitable alternative is transpiling Go to it. But why stop there, when you could have the backend and frontend speak to each other in protobufs using GRPC. Go nuts with everything in Golang!

Building and testing a distributed data store in Go

An engineer has to do a distributed database for this master’s thesis. What follows is a presentation of the concrete steps and mindset you need for doing this. The talk is heavy with references and insightful.

Day 2

Re-structuring a giant, ancient code-base for new platforms

LibreOffice is a massive sleeping giant. But people are working on it and the presenter came with some interesting war stories. There’s a beautiful slide with a timeline of the number of German comments in the codebase that started from a something big and over the time went to zero.

Security Theatre

Good review of the security events that happened in the past months. Ends with some questions that we should all ask ourselves more often.

Exploiting modern microarchitectures Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacks

Beautiful rundown of the recent events that happened in the world of microprocessors.

Day 3

Brugges is small and nice.