FOSDEM 2019 is now history. This was my second one and last year’s experience made this year’s trip much better. Being more familiar with the campus and giving a bigger time buffer before and after made a big difference. Just like last year there were oodles of talks but these are the ones that caught my eye - and I either saw them in person or caught them on video or plan to catch them on video.

25 Years of FreeBSD

I mainly went to this talk to see the next one, but this was a good talk giving a quick history of Unix from a FreeBSD perspective. There are a number of ways to look at that history so it was nice to see one that’s not heard often.

FreeBSD CI/CD

This was a talk on one person’s attempt to move FreeBSD CI/CD into, well, at least the recent present. Along the way he’s coming close to implementing docker and a CI/CD system. Plan to follow up as the year goes on to see about integrating it with gitlab-runner.

FreeBSD and Postgres

Almost overlooked this as the talk title was a bit odd. Excellent talk. Saw most in person and want to review a few times again. Likely will be the subject of one or more future posts. Follow the slides link as some of the last ones got skipped as he ran out of time.

FreeBSD mail and rspamd

Another FreeBSD talk interesting for the history it records as much as for the actual topic. For my professional uses rspamd isn’t quite there yet.

Automated Firewall Testing

Haven’t seen this one yet, but hoping this might be enough to get better container systems on FreeBSD. As the CI/CD talk covered, containers w/o network virtualisation can work for many cases, but even more use cases are covered with it.

Autocrypt Email

Folks keep trying to make encrypted email happen. This talk is a quick review of one attempt.

Email Standards

Email standards keep evolving. This talk covers the current standards driven evolutionary pressure.

Skulls Coreboot

Before the OS kicks in, the hardware’s firmware gets things set up. FOSS firmware is offered with the coreboot project. The Skulls project seeks to bring this to laptops.

Matrix in the French State

The French government is looking to use Matrix for their internal communications. This talk covers the road to the 1.0 release and what the French project has brought to it.

Dns Over Http

This talk tries to argue the case for DNS over HTTPS and why all the other ideas won’t work.

Postgresql 11

All about the newest version of PostgreSQL.

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along

Haven’t seen this talk but it looks interesting. It’s described in the blurb as, “Companies and communities have different goals, different structures and different challenges. This talk will discuss the differences between companies and communities that can lead to friction, confusion and missed opportunities. With one speaker from the company side and one from the community side, we plan to explore this occasionally prickly relationship from both directions.”

Hackers Gotta Eat

How to make a living doing FOSS. This talk is by the Jenkins Developers who have their own experience to share. Again, another talk I haven’t seen, but looks interesting.

Containerd Update

I saw the 1.0 announcement talk last year and want to see the update this year.

Containers K8s Rootless

rootless

Containers Kubectl Trace

Coding and deploying on k8s is generally much simpler in many ways, but debugging can be hard. This helps fix that.

The New Internet

Curious to see what people are doing to make the internet more secure and private. Haven’t seen this, and not sure how much will percolate out.

Homebrew 2

The main FOSS package manager for OS X is about to release a major milestone. This talk covers what’s coming and how it was developed.

Kubernetes Network Security Demystified

Networking isn’t my strong suit and k8s really pushes networking. Hoping this talk will clarify some of it.

LLVM for the Apollo Guidance Computer

A fascinating talk on getting LLVM to support the computer that got men to the moon.