going to FOSDEM 2014

It's FOSDEM 2014 again in two weeks time. And I'm looking forward to it : attending lectures, meeting people, talking about Open Source, ...

After having a quick look at the schedule with more than 500 (!) lectures over a period of a weekend, I made a selection of interesting talks, because obviously, it is impossible to attend them all :

• Saturday
  • Who ate my battery?
  • How we found a million style and grammar errors in the English Wikipedia ...and how to fix them
  • Autoscaling best practices
  • Debian Contributors A new, automatic, doocratic membership to change the face of Debian
  • Open Source Governance best practices roundtable
  • ...
• Sunday
  • F-Droid
  • HTML5 Video Part Deux
  • Memory Tuning Android for Low-RAM devices
  • Android Sensors 101
  • No more IPv4
  • Considering the Future of Copyleft
  • Taking license compatibility semi-seriously
  • ...

This was 2013 and plans for 2014!

It's this time of the year again, reviewing the cool things that happened, learning from the stuff that didn't go as planned and adjusting the goals of last year accordingly.

2013 was busy, here are some achievements :

• visited FOSDEM 2013 and did a talk on phpMyAdmin
• visited Newline 0x03
• co-organised a GSoC info session at UGent
• first Wagner experience : Parsifal, long but musically beautiful
• phpMyAdmin is accepted as a mentoring organisation for GSoC 2013 and has 6 students. I'll be a co-mentor and co-org admin this year
• got promoted to a higher pay grade
• did a citytrip to Berlin, visited LinuxTag 2013 and moderated a few sessions. I've also got some ideas for my Android app while attending the Android session.
• finished a few yellow routes at Bleau.
• did some outdoor rock climbing in Fontainebleau.
• did a presentation introducing Latex to my colleagues.
• visited Debconf13 held in Vaumarcus, Switzerland, were phpMyAdmin had a team meeting and did a phpMyAdmin tutorial.
• went to GSoC Mentor Summit 2013 at Google Headquarters, Mountain View, California, organised a Key Signing Party and  a session on international acceptance of Open Source licenses.
• did some climbing in Yosemite National Park
• released GetBack GPS, my first Android app
• prepared sabayon for the first time.
• made more than 2000 contributions (commits and created issues) in one year on github.
• travelled to the Philipines.

Check out my plans for 2014 :

• Android app development : After releasing an Android app this year for the first time, I plan to explore this path a bit more. Improving the GetBack GPS app a bit more, I still have some ideas as you can see on the roadmap, getting some more experience on automated testing, test driven development (TDD), Java and object oriented programming along the way.
  Another Android project for this year will use Bluetooth communication, in a small project I will work on with a friend.
• Bouldering/climbing : Last year I started climbing in the gym and I did some outdoor climbing as well. I utterly enjoy this, so I definitely want to spend some more time on it. Hopefully with some outdoor climbing trips during the upcoming year.
• Visit FOSDEM and LinuxTag.

I'm looking forward to an exciting year.
I wish you and your family the same, with good health and successful projects.