<commit_before>---
layout: post
category: articles
tags: fosdem cfgmgmtcamp conference log
---

A summary of the proceedings in Belgium at the start of February 2015, as experienced by your’s 
truly. Read about FOSDEM, Config Management Camp and shenanigans with peers from all corners.

### Getting to the conference

It was that magic time of the year again - Belgium lured professionals and enthusiasts to great 
conferences. FOSDEM is perhaps the world’s largest gathering of open source software contributors 
and vendors. For me, the place to be afterwards is Config Management Camp, a gathering of users and 
developers of configuration management software such as Puppet, Ansible or Chef. (Fun fact: there 
was broader interest in Ansible than Chef this year, apparently.)

Getting to Belgium is a breeze for me - I don’t live far from Berlin’s TXL airport, which is 
especially convenient for its short walking distances. As such, I set foot on Belgian ground some 
two hours after leaving my apartment.

However, for reasons that I will go into in a bit, I came a little ill prepared. I had not plotted 
a route from the airport to my hotel. I figured it would be simple enough to find my way across 
town. Boy, was I ever wrong. The bus terminal near the airport does not feature a map. There is a 
diagram of the means of public transport, but this is not helpful if you don’t know the name of 
the stops to which you could head.

#### Odyssey?

I retreated to the airport proper to connect to WiFi. Brussels airport requires lots of personal 
information before allowing access. What fun when using a cellphone late in the evening. To find my 
way, I tried my hotel’s website as well as the city of Brussels’ mobile website. Both proved 
utterly incapable of identifying a bus stop close to the hotel, let alone a route from the airport.

Now I don’t like to rely on Google for all things in my everyday life. But imagine my glee when 
the maps app gave me all the details I could want upon entering the destination address, along with 
live tracking that keeps working after leaving the WiFi zone. I had finally determined on which bus 
to get, and where to change lines. It was a little disappointing to learn that my ING visa card 
didn’t work with the ticket vending machines. Said machines won’t accept bills either, so I had 
to settle with getting my ticket directly on the bus. I braced myself for a revival of my high 
school French, but luckily the driver spoke some English.

The last leg of my journey from cold Berlin to FOSDEM proper was the 30 minute walk from the hotel 
to campus the next morning. The quarter of town that I wandered (Ixelles, I believe) is quite 
impressive. Historic architecture next to modern blocks and streets. Parks and public art wherever 
you look.

![Streets of 
Brussels](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/436765/6260239/11b5b0cc-b7dc-11e4-8b7d-7d26f58e
d18d.jpg)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After all, I did not have the luxury of checking into the hotel 
and getting to sleep right away.

### No sleep till campus

My conference season started of straight from an intense week of crunching at work. By the way - 
quick shoutout to MPeX.net GmbH who sponsored my whole trip and keep paying me for my humble 
developsing skills. So not only had I worked crazy hours for a straight week, I was also still on 
call duty during the last night before the con.

Murphy’s law was in full effect, apparently, and right when I finished the final chores that I 
had needed to bring from the office, the pager went bananas. An important server had decided to 
freeze up, so I took way over an hour to salvage things via hotel WiFi.

The following nights were not much more restful, with more than enough leftover and new tasks that 
needed finishing before the day of my return. Of course, I still had the advantage of not being 
jet-lagged at all; I live in Belgium’s timezone. Great respect to all guests who arrived from 
America and even volunteered at the conference in various capacities.

### The good, the bad and the smelly

[Oh, look, he’s finally going to write about FOSDEM. What do you know?] This was the first FOSDEM 
I attended and expectations were quite high. I had received recommendations from several peers who 
had been to some previous incarnations. And indeed, the atmosphere is quite amazing. Everyone is 
excited and curious and milling about. The sheer number of people that is scattered across the 
campus can give you the feeling of being part of some sort of strange and elaborate ant colony.

Within few minutes of wandering the halls, I chanced upon <NAME>, the first of many Puppet 
Labs employees to follow. The opening keynote was part of my schedule, although in hindsight, half 
an hour of additional sleep would have served me better. At least this way, I caught the useful 
advice to “not die on the slippery pathways between buildings”. First talks were in 
Configuration Management by Ryan and Adrian, including a sudden shout-out to me by the latter - 
thanks dude, that was rad! Met up with Peter after the talk as well.

After attending some urgent business (as in actual business - you won’t find toilet metaphors on 
this blog) I collected some advice from Eric to find Henrik in the cafeteria. To my amazement, he 
was not alone but in the company of Luke, Brian, Gareth, James and others, forming a veritable 
Puppet regular’s table.

#### So many peas, such small pots

After trading some more antics with Adrien, I tried to make my way into the Perl language room to 
hear about the new characteristics of Perl 6. No luck though - the language rooms were small and 
packed, for the most part. Perl in particular was not only fully seated with all walls lined by 
standing listeners, there were also people sitting in the space in front of the seats, and in 
virtually any square foot of empty floor.

Quick aside: one language room that was not crowded (at least at some times during day one) was 
about Open Document processing - if that’s your cup of tea, you might be able to have a relaxed 
time amidst the semi-orderly chaos that is FOSDEM.

There were other rooms that would never quite fill up, i.e. the larger rooms. The IaaS room in 
particular struck me. They had a larger auditorium and I was reminded of my university days - 
inconsiderate folks hogging the edge seats of otherwise empty rows abound. A diligent volunteer at 
the door guided stragglers towards easily reachable seats and started bouncing them away after 
those were all taken. After the morning in the crowded configuration management room, I was rather 
incredulous at the latter. There was a lesson to be learned:

> Before a talk starts, the organizers should make the seated attendees flush either to one side of 
the rows or the middle, leaving few or no empty seats between each other. This will allow 
stragglers to proceed to free seats even during the talk without causing a commotion.

#### Unique experience

Another highlight found me by surprise - one speaker in configuration management didn’t show up. 
The room organizers stood up to the challenge and took the stage for an impromptu Ask Me Anything 
session, themed around open source communities’ health and how to measure it. It contained a 
healthy side-dish on the topic of diversity in our larger community, which ended up as a recurring 
theme throughout the cons. More on these later.

Other notable impressions from FOSDEM:

* met and chatted with <NAME>
* the cafeteria serves no food whatsoever - bring your own, likely from the decentralized food court
* note to self, do get at least one waffle next year - what’s wrong with you?
* the Puppet stand was hosted by the illustrious Johan De Wit
* <NAME> could occasionally be found at the inofficial Puppet Labs cafeteria table
* Kara and Dawn were absolutely rocking the configuration management room
* getting into James’ talk was difficult but rewarding
* both Adrien and Eric claim to have the attention span of a young squirrel - coincidence?

![Perl](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/436765/6260241/11b85afc-b7dc-11e4-9165-16d45d753a
e9.jpg)

Towards the end, I caught one talk on the main track after all - <NAME> promised to present on 
the imminent release of Perl 6. In front of a packed lecture hall, this grand master of open source 
celebrated (fittingly) a lecture. He came prepared with an endless stream of Tolkien allegories to 
the Perl languages, strung into a loose narrative. While rather entertaining, it missed some golden 
opportunities (where were the movie stills with silly captions?) and generally failed to live up to 
its potential due to a somewhat wooden delivery. Still, we were witnessing living history on stage, 
and it sure was entertaining to watch jet-lagged Americans loosing it to the surreality of it all. 
Check out Adrien’s twitter feed from February 1st for all the details.

### Condensing it

After The Tolkien Lecture, I hung out with Adrien, Peter and Morgan. After some antics in the 
cafeteria and the futile attempt to get into a talk on testing, we were found by <NAME> Igor. 
Adrien and Morgan wrapped up their conference duties and we all departed for Ghent. Config 
Management Camp was finally at hand.

Transfer to Ghent is always quite pleasant. Train tickets are inexpensive, yet the trains are quite 
comfortable and practical. Some two hours of riding and shenanigans later, we arrived in Ghent Sint 
Pieter’s to check into our respective hotels and meet up with Henrik et al for Sushi soon after. 
I was amazed to finally lay eyes on the breath-taking old town core, after having spent the entire 
con last year near the station and college.

![Ghent](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/436765/6260240/11b76b88-b7dc-11e4-9f78-81dac7984
c84.jpg)

Config Management Camp is smaller than FOSDEM by at least an order of magnitude. All attendees can 
fit themselves into a large lobby for coffee and snacks. It’s not unlike a large family reunion, 
and it even feels kind of like that. Everyone gets together, catches up, builds new connections and 
generally has a lot of fun. The talks are much more concentrated as well, naturally. There are only 
few tracks, and quite a number of slots that are only filled by the main track. This year, the 
amazing keynotes featured <NAME> and other excellent speakers.
Not much of a tracker

The Puppet track was quite captivating again. Aside from Luke’s traditional Q&A session, it 
boasted talks from various Puppet Labs employees such as Morgan and Colleen, as well as reknown 
community members like RI. I had resolved to not glue myself onto this track exclusively, as I had 
last year, but the folks didn’t make it easy. The more interesting Chef talks overlapped with 
ones that I felt to be obligatory in Puppet. As a compromise, I did manage to catch some main track 
action, such as Gareth’s wonderful presentation (or, as I felt, his sermon - difficult to grasp 
in full depth, broad and encompassing, and leaving you with a sense that there is a greater scheme 
of things).

I cannot stress this enough - Config Management Camp is much denser with networking opportunities 
than FOSDEM, with coordinated breaks, free catering, a semi-open bar at the first day’s evening 
and a general atmosphere that is much more personal. Shout-out to the great Puppet Labs folks (and 
Igor!) who took me out on Tuesday. Funniest night of this year - you know who you are.

### Recurring themes

It appeared to me that this year of conferences was themed around a few central aspects. Of course, 
this impression is partly informed by my choice of talks to listen to, but some issues were 
pervasive.

#### Clouds

Well, this particular buzzword is not new at all. Still, and especially from an operations 
perspective, there are certain aspects of the topic that bear repeating and ever further 
exploration:

the “do”s and “don’t”s of building cloud based platforms
existing and emerging technologies to create and manage such platforms
the wider view across the board, with fundamental considerations

These are exciting times for this industry. If you will, you can even see a shadow of Skynet 
between the lines of some of the presentations…or this is just me growing silly/paranoid/ecstatic.

#### Testing

Despite missing the complete testing track at FOSDEM, I found myself watching testing related 
presentations in the context of configuration management time and again. This is only logical, I <commit_msg>belgium: last fixes and link restoration.<commit_after>---
layout: post
category: articles
tags: fosdem cfgmgmtcamp conference log
---

A summary of the proceedings in Belgium at the start of February 2015, as experienced by your’s 
truly. Read about FOSDEM, Config Management Camp and shenanigans with peers from all corners.

### Getting to the conference

It was that magic time of the year again - Belgium lured professionals and enthusiasts to great 
conferences. [FOSDEM](http://fosdem.org) is one of the world’s largest gathering of open source software contributors 
and vendors. For me, the place to be afterwards is [Config Management Camp](http://cfgmgmtcamp.eu), a gathering of users and 
developers of configuration management software such as Puppet, Ansible or Chef. (Fun fact: attendees
expressed broader interest in Ansible than Chef this year, apparently.)

Getting to Belgium is a breeze for me - I don’t live far from Berlin’s TXL airport, which is 
especially convenient, thanks to its short walking distances. As such, I set foot on Belgian ground some 
two hours after leaving my apartment.

However, for reasons that I will go into in a bit, I came a little ill prepared. I had not plotted 
a route from the airport to my hotel. I figured it would be simple enough to find my way across 
town. Boy, was I ever wrong. The bus terminal near the airport does not feature a map. There is a 
diagram of the means of public transport, but this is not helpful if you don’t know the name of 
the stops to which you could head.

#### Odyssey?

I retreated to the airport proper to connect to WiFi. Brussels airport requires lots of personal 
information before allowing access. What fun when using a cellphone late in the evening. To find my 
way, I tried my hotel’s website as well as the city of Brussels’ mobile website. Both proved 
utterly incapable of identifying a bus stop close to the hotel, let alone a route from the airport.

Now I don’t like to rely on Google for all things in my everyday life. But imagine my glee when 
the maps app gave me all the details I could want upon entering the destination address, along with 
live tracking that keeps working after leaving the WiFi zone. I had finally determined on which bus 
to get, and where to change lines. It was a little disappointing to learn that my ING visa card 
didn’t work with the ticket vending machines. Said machines won’t accept bills either, so I had 
to settle with getting my ticket directly on the bus. I braced myself for a revival of my high 
school French, but luckily the driver spoke some English.

The last leg of my journey from cold Berlin to FOSDEM proper was the 30 minute walk from the hotel 
to campus the next morning. The quarter of town that I wandered (Ixelles, I believe) is quite 
impressive. Historic architecture next to modern blocks and streets. Parks and public art wherever 
you look.

![Streets of Brussels](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/436765/6260239/11b5b0cc-b7dc-11e4-8b7d-7d26f58ed18d.jpg)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After all, I did not have the luxury of checking into the hotel 
and getting to sleep right away.

### No sleep till campus

My conference season started off straight from an intense week of crunching at work. By the way - 
quick shoutout to [MPeX.net GmbH](http://mpexnetworks.de)
who sponsored my whole trip and keep paying me for my humble 
developsing skills. So not only had I worked crazy hours for a straight week, I was also still on 
call duty during the last night before the con.

Murphy’s law was in full effect, apparently, and right when I finished the final chores that I 
had needed to bring from the office, the pager went bananas. An important server had decided to 
freeze up, so I took way over an hour to salvage things via hotel WiFi.

The following nights were not much more restful, with more than enough leftover and new tasks that 
needed finishing before the day of my return. Of course, I still had the advantage of not being 
jet-lagged at all; I live in Belgium’s timezone. Great respect to all guests who arrived from 
America and even volunteered at the conference in various capacities.

### The good, the bad and the smelly

[Oh, look, he’s finally going to write about FOSDEM. What do you know?] This was the first FOSDEM 
I attended and expectations were quite high. I had received recommendations from several peers who 
had been to some previous incarnations. And indeed, the atmosphere is quite amazing. Everyone is 
excited and curious and milling about. The sheer number of people that is scattered across the 
campus can give you the feeling of being part of some sort of strange and elaborate ant colony.

Within few minutes of wandering the halls, I chanced upon [<NAME>](https://twitter.com/ahpook), the first of many Puppet 
Labs employees to follow. The opening keynote was part of my schedule, although in hindsight, half 
an hour of additional sleep would have served me better. At least this way, I caught the useful 
advice to “not die on the slippery pathways between buildings”. First talks were in 
Configuration Management by [Ryan](https://twitter.com/ryancoleman) and [Adrian](https://twitter.com/nullfinch)
(who noticed and greeted my mid-sentence - thanks dude, that was rad). Met up with
[Peter](https://twitter.com/petersouter) after the talk as well.

After attending some urgent business (as in actual business - you won’t find toilet euphemisms on 
this blog) I collected some advice from Eric to find [Henrik](https://twitter.com/hel) in the cafeteria. To my amazement, he 
was not alone but in the company of [Luke](https://twitter.com/puppetmasterd),
[Brian](https://twitter.com/brianstein), [Gareth](https://twitter.com/garethr),
[James](https://twitter.com/kartar) and others, forming a veritable Puppet regular’s table.

#### So many peas, such small pots

After trading some more antics with Adrien, I tried to make my way into the Perl language room to 
hear about the new characteristics of Perl 6. No luck though - the language rooms were small and 
packed, for the most part. Perl in particular was not only fully seated with all walls lined by 
standing listeners. There were also people sitting in the space in front of the seats, and in 
virtually any square foot of empty floor.

Quick aside: one language room that was not crowded (at least at some times during day one) was 
about Open Document processing - if that’s your cup of tea, you might be able to have a relaxed 
time amidst the semi-orderly chaos that is FOSDEM.

There were other rooms that would never quite fill up, i.e. the larger rooms. The IaaS room in 
particular struck me. They had a larger auditorium and I was reminded of my university days - 
inconsiderate folks hogging the edge seats of otherwise empty rows abound. A diligent volunteer at 
the door guided stragglers towards easily reachable seats and started bouncing them away after 
those were all taken. After the morning in the crowded configuration management room, I was rather 
incredulous at the latter. There was a lesson here:

> Before a talk starts, the organizers should make the seated attendees flush either to one side of 
the rows or the middle, leaving few or no empty seats between each other. This will allow 
stragglers to proceed to free seats even during the talk without causing a commotion.

Such hiccups aside, the talk program was truly amazingly organized by the staff of volunteers.

#### Unique experience

Another highlight found me by surprise - one speaker in configuration management didn’t show up. 
The room organizers stood up to the challenge and took the stage for an impromptu Ask Me Anything 
session, themed around open source communities’ health and how to measure it. It contained a 
tasty side-dish on the topic of diversity in our larger community, which ended up as a recurring 
theme throughout the cons. More on these later.

Other notable impressions from FOSDEM:

* met and chatted with [<NAME>ort](https://twitter.com/lutterkort)
* the cafeteria serves no food whatsoever - bring your own, likely from the decentralized food court
* note to self, do get at least one waffle next year - what’s wrong with you?
* the Puppet stand was hosted by the illustrious Johan De Wit
* [<NAME>](https://twitter.com/mitchellh) could occasionally be found at the inofficial Puppet Labs cafeteria table
* [Kara](https://twitter.com/feynudibranch), [Dawn](https://twitter.com/geekygirldawn) et al were absolutely rocking the configuration management room
* getting into James’ talk was difficult but rewarding
* both Adrien and Eric claim to have the attention span of a young squirrel - coincidence?

![Perl](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/436765/6260241/11b85afc-b7dc-11e4-9165-16d45d753ae9.jpg)

Towards the end, I caught one talk on the main track after all - <NAME> promised to present on 
the imminent release of Perl 6. In front of a packed lecture hall, this grand master of open source 
celebrated (fittingly) a lecture. He came prepared with an endless stream of Tolkien allegories to 
the Perl languages, strung into a loose narrative. While rather entertaining, it missed some golden 
opportunities (where were the movie stills with silly captions?) and generally failed to live up to 
its potential due to a somewhat wooden delivery. Still, we were witnessing living history on stage, 
and it sure was entertaining to watch jet-lagged Americans loosing it to the surreality of it all. 
Check out [Adrien's twitter feed](https://twitter.com/nullfinch) from February 1st for all the details.

### Condensing it

After The Tolkien Lecture, I hung out with Adrien, Peter and [Morgan](https://twitter.com/knittynerd). After some antics in the 
cafeteria and the futile attempt to get into a talk on testing, we were found by
[David](https://twitter.com/dev_el_ops) and [Igor](https://twitter.com/hirojin). 
Adrien and Morgan wrapped up their conference duties and we all departed for Ghent. Config 
Management Camp was finally at hand.

Transfer to Ghent is always quite pleasant. Train tickets are inexpensive, yet the trains are quite 
comfortable and practical. Some two hours of riding and shenanigans later, we arrived in Ghent Sint 
Pieter's to check into our respective hotels and then meet up with Henrik et al for sushi.
I was amazed to finally lay eyes on the breath-taking old town core, after having spent the entire 
con last year near the station and college.

![Ghent](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/436765/6260240/11b76b88-b7dc-11e4-9f78-81dac7984
c84.jpg)

Config Management Camp is smaller than FOSDEM by at least an order of magnitude. All attendees can 
fit themselves into a large lobby for coffee and snacks. It's not unlike a large family reunion, 
and it even feels kind of like that. Everyone gets together, catches up, builds new connections and 
generally has a lot of fun. The talks are much more focused as well, naturally. There are only 
a handful of tracks, and quite a number of slots that are only filled on the main track. This year, the 
amazing keynotes featured <NAME> and other excellent speakers.

#### Not much of a tracker

The Puppet track was quite captivating again. Aside from Luke's traditional Q&A session, it 
boasted talks from various Puppet Labs employees such as Morgan and [Colleen](https://twitter.com/pdx_krinkle),
as well as reknown 
community members like [RI](https://twitter.com/ripienaar).
I had resolved to not glue myself onto this track exclusively the way I had handled it
last year, but the folks didn't make it easy. The more interesting Chef talks overlapped with 
ones that I felt to be obligatory in Puppet. As a compromise, I did manage to catch some main track 
action, such as Gareth's wonderful presentation (or, as I felt, his sermon - difficult to grasp 
in full depth, broad and encompassing, and leaving you with a sense that there is a greater scheme 
of things).

I cannot stress this enough - Config Management Camp is much denser with networking opportunities 
than FOSDEM, with coordinated breaks, free catering, a semi-open bar at the first day's evening 
and a general atmosphere that is much more personal. Shout-out to the great Puppet Labs folks (and 
Igor!) who took me out on Tuesday. Funniest night in quite a while - you know who you are.

### Recurring themes

It appeared to me that this year of conferences was themed around a few central aspects. Of course, 
this impression is partly informed by my choice of talks to listen to, but some issues were 
pervasive.

#### Clouds

Well, this particular buzzword is not new at all. Still, and especially from an operations 
perspective, there are certain aspects of the topic that bear repeating and ever further 
exploration:

the “do”s and “don’t”s of building cloud based platforms
existing and emerging technologies to create and manage such platforms
the wider view across the board, with fundamental considerations

These are exciting times for this industry. If you will, you can even see a shadow of Skynet 
between the lines of some of the presentations…or this is just me growing silly/paranoid/ecstatic.

#### Testing

Despite missing the complete testing track at FOSDEM, I found myself watching testing related 
presentations in the context of configuration management time and again. This is only logical, I 
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