The Honor Part (That I’m Still Processing) 🔗
Let me start with the big one: I was invited to the European Open Source Awards ceremony on Thursday evening. Not “bought a ticket” invited—actually invited. If you know the European Union, you know this is invitation-only, and honestly, I’m still a bit stunned.
So, picture me, finally seated in my seat on the train, ready to go and checklisting everything. I have the dress, the belt, the purse, the jewels, even the hair accessories. Stilettos? Nope : they had decided to stay at home, in their very peaceful closet. Cue panic shopping at Repetto for my first €400 pair of shoes. They have 7.5cm heels and are somehow comfortable enough that I’m questioning my entire understanding of footwear physics.
During the ceremony, I ran into Simon Clavier there, “Mr. Open Source” at SNCF and president of TOSIT.
We talked about how Open Source is shifting from “nice to have” to “strategic necessity” in Europe. More on that later.
Friday: The Real Work (Before the Chaos) 🔗
While everyone was gearing up for the weekend (or attending FSODEM PGDay), I spent Friday heads-down on something I’ve been obsessing over lately: understanding PAX storage layout proposed by Ailamaki in 2001.
Think: columnar storage performance with PostgreSQL’s ACID guarantees and ecosystem.
Stay tuned. This is going to be fun.
Evening: ramens and beers with the Postgres community. The calm before the FOSDEM storm.
FOSDEM 101: I Didn’t Attend a Single Talk (And That’s Fine) 🔗
Here’s the thing about FOSDEM: if you’re spending all your time in conference rooms, you’re doing it wrong.
The real sport? Sticker hunting. My laptop needed pimping, and I scored a rare gem: a Greenland support sticker (see photo). Yes, geopolitics meets laptop decoration. Only at FOSDEM.
Saturday Night: Incus, Infrastructure, and Digital Sovereignty 🔗
By the end of this very busy day, we decided to visit the inimitable Moeder lambic. We had beers with Stéphane Graber (Incus/LXD creator). We geeked out about infrastructure-as-code for database testing.
Spoiler: I’m writing “Incus for DBAs” soon (landing on Planet PostgreSQL). Spin up multi-version Postgres test environments in seconds. No Docker bloat, full system containers, actual sovereignty over your infrastructure.
And that word, sovereignty, came up everywhere this year.
Sovereignty Isn’t Just About Data Anymore 🔗
Later that night, it was vanilla vodka cocktails with whipped cream and crème brûlée syrup (yes, really) with the Clever Cloud team. Then we migrated to another bar with the same party when the first one closed. The second one kicked us out at 3:30 AM.
The recurring theme in every conversation: European tech companies are done with dependency.
For individuals, it’s “can I still use my washing machine if US policy shifts?” For companies, it’s “can we keep our servers running? Our network? Our industrial machines?”
Open Source isn’t a philosophy play anymore: it’s infrastructure defense.
The Most FOSDEM Moment Ever 🔗
Picture this: ~2 PM Saturday, FOSDEM cafeteria. Perfect timing to help digest the frites-fricadelle.
Me, Boris Mejías, and Álvaro Herrera solving a classic coding interview problem, you know, the “valid parentheses/brackets” stack challenge.
Our solution? A recursive CTE in PostgreSQL, implementing a stack that would grow or decrease with the latest openeing/closing parenthesis or bracket.
We were very proud of ourselves.
Then we asked an AI. It suggested regexp_replace() in a recursive CTE. 45
lines of code to throw away and 11 easily readable lines of code to keep.
Yeah. We felt pretty stupid. With SQL. At FOSDEM.
That’s FOSDEM.
The Takeaway 🔗
FOSDEM isn’t about the talks you attend. It’s about:
- The conversations that happen between “one more beer” and “okay maybe we should eat”
- The stickers you collect
- The code challenges you solve with pain, sweat and tears when AI has a simpler answer
- The quiet realization that Open Source is becoming Europe’s tech sovereignty play
Laptop fully stickered. Brain full of ideas. PAX implementation in progress.
See you next year, Brussels.