FOSDEM 2021 — The Year without my usual trip to Brussels

This should have been my sixth FOSDEM.

By now, I’m used to starting each year the same way: a quick train ride to Brussels, the familiar buzz of the ULB campus, and the yearly challenge of trying to fit six parallel tracks of devrooms into the same hour while navigating hallways packed like an overfull packet queue. Five FOSDEMs behind me, and every February had become its own small ritual.

But this year is different. This year, there is no campus. No devrooms echoing with rapid-fire Q&A. No waffles, no chilly Brussels wind, no late-evening pub gatherings after one too many technical debates. Thanks, Corona.

A Different World

It’s strange how quickly the world changed. Not long ago, FOSDEM was the place where the open-source community physically converged. You could see maintainers you’d only known from Git commits, overhear conversations that sparked new ideas, or end up in a hallway discussion that taught you more than any scheduled talk.

Now the world is quieter. Meetings have turned into video calls. Conferences have become links instead of locations. And the spontaneity—the magic that happens in the gaps between presentations—has been replaced by chat windows and muted microphones.

Missing the People Most

More than any devroom—DNS or otherwise—what I miss most is running into people. The friends I made over the years. The acquaintances I bumped into annually. The new faces I met by accident because someone laughed at a joke I made about resolvers or recommended I check out a talk in a devroom I hadn’t even planned to visit.

FOSDEM has always been about community, and this year, that absence feels particularly sharp.

Looking Ahead

Still, I’m hopeful. Open source is resilient. People adapt. Communities survive. And one day—maybe not this year, maybe not next—we’ll be back in those noisy hallways, swapping stickers, comparing notes, and pretending we don’t know where to sit at lunch.

When that day comes, I’ll be there.