leboncoin at Fosdem 2018
by Xavier Krantz, Gildas Chabot, Kévin Platel & Christopher Moreau
3 weeks ago, like each year since 2000, FOSDEM gathered thousands of geeks at the Solbosch campus of ULB to share knowledge and passion about Free and OpenSource software.
If you have already been to FOSDEM, you know it is a very busy and special event. This edition was no exception to the rule and featured 361 speakers, 347 events, and more than 56 tracks.
There were essentially 5 different categories of sessions and activities: keynotes, main tracks, developer rooms, lightning talks and certification exams.
All sessions have been recorded and can be found here.
Leboncoin at FOSDEM?
As you may already know, we are an intense user of Open Source projects for our IT infrastructure and projects. It is an important part of our DNA and we want to give back as much as possible in the next coming years.
Therefore, it was obvious for us to attend FOSDEM. (who said beers?)
Despite the fact that this year we were not able to speak about a project as contributors, we were proud to see Gildas, one of our back end developers, in the popular and crowded Go devroom.
Gildas Chabot (Back End Developer) and his vision about Upspin and a future of the Internet
Upspin is both a protocol and a reference implementation for a global name space for network-accessible files that comes with permissions and end-to-end encryption. With simplicity at its core (the protocol is just 10 methods), it is very versatile and can be a building block for a decentralized Internet
Last October, Rob Pike published the Upspin manifesto on his blog — command center. This manifesto is centered around a concept that I care about: the separation of producers and consumers of data. I had been wanting to create web services that could freely interoperate and Upspin is a wonderful tool for that. Since then, I have been working on a collection of Upspin client and servers to prove the concept.
In this talk I presented: — the basic concepts and architecture of Upspin — my implementations of Upspin client and servers (directory and storage) — my thoughts about what can be done with Upspin.
Feedback
Xavier Krantz (SRE)
FOSDEM hosted so many interesting sessions that it is hard to select only a few of them as my favorites.
As System Engineer / Ops / SRE, here are the 6 main talks I was pretty interested in:
Google’s approach to distributed systems observability for Go
Distributing DevOps tools using GoLang and Containers, for Fun and Profit!
diskimage-builder: Building Linux Images for Cloud / Virtualization / Container
Kudos to the staff who, once again, did an amazing job!
Kévin Platel (Back End Developer)
It was my first time at FOSDEM and it was amazing!
It is a very unique kind of conference with a lot of rooms talking about very wide variety of subjects. You could switch from a discussion about functional programming languages to a satellite DIY.
I spent most of my Saturday in the Golang room which had a lot of talks about industry feedback and project presentation.
The FOSDEM was very interesting, but I retained mostly this:
The presentation of the next version of Go (1.10), filled with humor by Francesc Campoy.
I liked this talk for the in-depth presentation of the new release of the Go programming language with some highlights of some minor aspects of the release but which will have a big impact in the developer’s day-to-day life, best of all that it was presented with some jokes and nice examples, what else?
The performance analysis of Go code
I write a lot of Go code at work or for my personal use and it’s not always obvious what is good or bad performance practice, but it’s even harder to know why it’s bad practice! This talk was very interesting because the speaker really took the time to explain why his recommendation was valuable with real world examples for each. It was a very interesting talk and I wish it was longer!
GoCV
I remember this talk for a particular reason: the demonstration. The speaker really brought his talk to life with a lot of live demos for each feature, like a filming a round robot (like BB8 in Star Wars) or flying a drone filming the audience with a machine learning powered camera !
In addition to the demos, the project was very promising because bringing such a huge project (openCV) in Go demonstrates the power of the language and its potential use in a larger part of the industry.
It was a very nice week-end with a lot of talks and Belgian beers! 🍻
Christopher Moreau (Back End Developer)
This was my first time at FOSDEM too.
The large number of attendees made the traffic between conference rooms quite difficult; I had a bit of trouble making it to the talks I was interested in. Even so, I saw some and I particularly enjoyed two of them:
The story of UPSat Building the first open source software and hardware satellite
A small group of the open space foundation made the first open source satellite (UPSat) and presented us the entire process from the manufacturing to the space launch.
This talk was particularly interesting since they showed us how they actually built and put in orbit their own UPSat. They also showed us the video of the launch.
Exploiting modern microarchitectures Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacks
The Spectre and Meltdown exploits explained by one of the main architects at RedHat working with the team developing the mitigation patch.
This talk was a good explanation of the recent processor flaws. The intended duration was 3 hours, but the speaker had to fit it in 50 minutes It still allowed me to better understand the recent attacks.
