So, for the first time in my life, if we exclude the local Linux Day events, I attended a conference! FOSDEM 2010 has been my first time properly meeting other developers out there. It actually was a bit more travel than just Bruxelles, for me; I actually took a long way to get there. Since I was still afraid of planes, I didn’t want to go up there alone. Add to that, the fact that I’m neither used to Bruxelles area, nor I speak any decent French any more (I studied it in middle-school, so I could at least ask for, and listen to, directions, but in over ten years not using it, it really just went away), so I got there with Luca who lives in Turin (in the other side of Italy).

The end result looks something like this: I left Mestre (the Venice inland city, which is where I actually live) by train, I changed in Milan, then arrived in Turin; I went to dinner with some friends I only met online before (colleagues and fellow Ultima OnLine players), and slept at Alessandro’s – from lscube – flat. In the morning me and Luca took the plane for Rome, then changed to the one for Bruxelles. Our luggage decided to take a later plane (d’oh!). The same travel (minus the luggage nuisance, fortunately) applied to the way back. This resulted in something like five trains (one from the Bruxelles Airport to the Gare du Nord — we took a cab to go back), and four planes. I think my fear of planes was totally cured this time.

FOSDEM itself was lots fun! I finally met lots of other Gentoo developers (including Luca for the first time), the other FFmpeg guys, some of the VLC guys, and quite a few users who knew me, even though I didn’t know them before, which I have to say has a nice feeling to it. And I even met with a Mono team delegation, and with the one guy that I had a rough start with – Jo Shields, “directhex” – I should report every misunderstanding is cleared. I was also able to (very briefly) meet Lennart, but that was when me and Luca really had to hurry to catch our plane back.

I really would have liked to stay the whole Sunday and leave on Monday, but Luca was actually due to be back in Turin for other reasons, so we had to live early on Sunday to get back to Italy before all planes stopped flying.

Now, during FOSDEM I picked up a few extra tasks other than all the stuff that I’ve had already planned, and this means that the next few days will get me almost no time to breath, to take a break, or to go out with friends. That’s fine, I had four days that relaxed me quite a bit, so this is not too bad to do. Just so I can name some of the tasks that I’m looking forward for, beside the key signing (that was a “cool” party… even though it was maybe too cold), is writing something more about release notifications as it seems like I’m not the only person having a problem with that, trying to write some more about upstreaming patches, and packaging SIP Communicator – a demo of which was available next to the FFmpeg stand in the AW building… looked very promising, and getting an hash table implementation in libavutil for FFmpeg, so that we can use it on feng and libnemesi and thus get a good parser, finally!

Anyway this is enough for today, hope the other people at FOSDEM found it at least as fun, for me is time to hit (finally, my) bed.