NixCon 2025

I’ve attended https://2025.nixcon.org in Rapperswil-Jona near Zürich in Switzerland, and here are some thoughts about it, written up on my way home.

Nix is several things:

• an interesting but at least initially to me a bit scary functional configuration language
• a package 📦 manager (like apt or dnf), which can be used on any Linux distro, as well as on 🍎 Macs (like Homebrew 🍺 brew)
• a declarative Linux distro called NixOS (like Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian)

This may be one part of what makes it a little hard to grasp in the beginning. Other parts could be the at least initially somewhat confusing old (nix-* commands) vs. new (Flakes; and nix … commands) usage styles, the several docs sites (and Wiki), and different ways of doing many things. On the other hand, perhaps some of this “I need to figure out things for myself like I used to on my first 8bit home computer” (if you’re old enough to remember?) is also what appeals to people interested in Nix? ✅ Check for myself personally! 😆

FOSDEM 2025

https://www.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/

Saturday 2025-02-01

Welcome

• FOSDEM was the 1st IPv6-only non-network large-scale conference
• Quote: “Send us your anecdotes, e.g. if you met someone here at FOSDEM and got married.”
• https://FOSStodon.org/#FOSDEM
• February 1st is Global Switch Day, from:
  • Twitter to Mastodon
  • Instagram to Pixelfeed
  • WhatsApp to Signal (or Threema!)
  • Facebook to Friendica
  • YouTube to PeerTube
  • TikTok to Loops.video
• Sponsored by Google, Red Hat, ARM, Block, Bloomberg, CNCF, Codethink, Colt, Element, dstny, Eclipse Foundation, Mozilla

Logo

• Seymour Papert, Jean Piaget (Swiss), Marvin Minskey, Alan Key (Xerox PARC, “A personal computer for children of all ages”, 1972); MIT
• Speaker worked with Alan Key
• Turtle, making it physical is important
• Logo
• Smalltalk-80, Squeak open-sourced in 1996 by Alan Key, eToys; try Squeak.js
• Scratch is #12 on TIOBE programming languages popularity

This is what got me started - a 100 years ago; Thank You, MIGROS Klubschule St.Gallen.

FOSDEM 2024

I attended FOSDEM 2024 in Bruxelles (Brussels) on Sat/Sun Feb 3/4, 2024.

The full agenda shows there again was a lot of content, as at many big tech conference. Below are notes about a few session I listened in to. Do have a look around the schedule and check out the slides and recordings of other sessions in your own areas of interest!

This must have been I think my 4th or 5th time attending this “event for free software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate”. Looks like I last blogged in 2021 (but I seem to have been too lazy in 2023 and 2019 & 2018).

Voxxed Days Zürich 2023-03-16

Today I attended Voxxed Days Zürich.

Voxxed Days are a series of technical conferences for developers, affiliated with the legendary https://devoxx.com.

Future events include the Voxxed Days in Ticino on 2024-01-19 and next year’s in ZRH on 2024-03-07.

It is locally organized, with 25% of speakers from Switzerland (and 22% female speakers, great!), and sponsored by Swiss IT companies such as Swisscom, Gradle Enterprise (!), ELCA, Julius Bär, Red Hat, Ergon, Adesso, Mimacom, CSS.

FOSDEM 2021

I “attended” (virtually, thanks COVID-19) FOSDEM 2021 on Sat/Sun Feb 6/7, 2021.

https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/ has the full schedule - and there’s a lot, as with any big tech conference.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9NuJImUbaSNKiwF2bdSfAw has (will have) recordings. Here are talk I listened in to:

Cloud Infra

• https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/containers_datacenter_class/ about how https://www.opencompute.org open design HW “2nd life” that can be bought (again; “circular IT HW”) on https://www.itrenew.com/explore-solutions/ (pricing on http://bit.ly/sesame-specials; more on https://stands.fosdem.org/stands/sesame_discovery/) and managed with https://github.com/opencomputeproject and https://rackn.com/rebar/ (like https://metal3.io?) - at home? ;) I know what I want for christmas, LOL.