I’ve been umming and arring over conferences this year. One that I don’t want to miss is FOSDEM – the Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting, on a weekend next month in Brussels.

FOSDEM is a great grass-roots event that is full of friendly hackers. Add a wonderful city to the mix, and what more do you want? I attended FOSDEM a couple of years ago, when I was invited as a speaker – my talk was on “Understanding Jabber Components“, which went down well.

I remember noticing that other speakers in earlier talks were having difficulties with the huge size of the projector displays (they couldn’t reach to point to anything in the top halves of the slides) so just before the start of my talk I rushed outside and grabbed a fallen branch to use as a pointer. It turned out to be a great ice breaker, and rather useful too (Ralph Meijer, who’s done some cool things with Jabber, took the pictures – thanks Ralph).

In the run up to that conference in 2002, I also introduced O’Reilly UK to the FOSDEM organisers, with a view to sponsorship. Seems to have turned out well.

And I’ve just noticed that Dave Cross, a fellow London Perl Monger, is speaking at FOSDEM this time around. (Ok, I’m unfortunately only an occasional monger these days, because I’m never in the right place at the right time). Nice one Dave!