So, my I may have slightly miscalculated how early I needed to get to the airport for my flight to Brussels for FOSDEM 2014…

I try to get to the airport super early, as I’ve managed to never miss a flight, I’m normally before checkin even opens. So, I look at my ticket and I mentally add in 2 hours before I need to get there and book a taxi. Somewhere along the line, I’d managed to do this 2 hour calculation twice. So I stayed up all night and got a lift from my friends place to Heathrow.

Taxi Driver: “Err, I’m not sure if there’s flights this early?”

Me: “Nope, I’ve checked, it’s defintly…” looks at ticket “…damnit”

So, I ended up catching up on Boardwalk Empire for 3 hours. I couldn’t even check in for 90 minutes…

So, unsuprisignly, when I got to Brussels I was pretty much dead on my feet and slept through most of the day and missed the beer meetup on the first day, sad times!

Other than this slightly shaky start, it was probably one of the best event’s I’ve ever been to. Loads of talks on pretty much every subject under the sun (except Ruby surprisingly…) and everyone was super friendly, and it was pretty easy to just end up talking to people about new technology and open-source.

The popular rooms were rammed 24⁄7. Being an ops person, I was mainly interested in the Configuration Management track. However, it was pretty packed…

A bit Busy...

That’s the queue of people watching a talk, with every seat in the room filled. Pretty intense!

However, they recorded everything! Even though according to this post, the final videos aren’t ready yet, but if you go to http://video.fosdem.org/ most of the videos are already up. Go check them out!

Overall, it was an amazing experience and I’d recommend anyone with an interest in open-source or cool and interesting new technology to go next year!