Day Two Part II - FOSDEM 2024
After closing my moderation duties, I explored FOSDEM booths before meeting folks at Building K. With the train booked for Amsterdam to attend the Fedora Council F2F meeting, I helped wrap up the Distribution Devroom venue before joining the CentOS HyperScale folks for dinner in the evening.
After congratulating Frantisek Lachman on his performance and informing Justin W. Flory about the closure of my assigned moderation period, I left to meet with Kushal Das and his family at around 0245 pm Central European Standard Time. While Anwesha Das was preparing to leave, Kushal Das asked me to wait for some time at Building K. I decided to explore the booths located nearby and purchase some more free and open-source swags. After having a brief catchup with Carl George, I reconvened with Kushal Das and we saw Anwesha Das off at the parking who was heading off to attend the Config Management Camp at Ghent, Belgium.
With Kushal Das, his daughter and I walking on our way back to building K, we caught up on our conversations and met up with Saptak Sengupta, both of them were coincidentally staying at the same hotel as me and claimed to have seen me leave in hurry in the morning. We decided to catch up later in the hotel and I started heading back to building UA to moderate the last few talks of the day. I also wanted to book a train ticket from Brussels Noord to Amsterdam Central for the coming Fedora Council Hackfest 2024 meeting. Scaling up the stairs to the very tail end of the room, I handed over a box of the much-adored Vakadvadis to Justin W. Flory.
After meeting up with Aoife Moloney and Peter Boy who were attending their assigned booth duty periods, I logged into the NS International website to book myself a train ticket from Brussels Noord to Amsterdam Central. On completing the booking for the train IC 9239 costing a special rate of 60 Euros (applicable for those younger than twenty-five years of age), I decided to attend the talk on "An Introduction To Image Builder" by Sanne Raymaekers at around 0330 pm Central European Standard Time, which was followed by the one by Daniel Kolesa on "2023 in Chimera Linux" and the one by Mike McQuaid on "Homebrew's Evolution".
Unfortunately unlike the previous edition, Mike McQuaid did not have the beer costume equipped for the presentation associated with the HomeBrew Project and the same was remarked by Justin W. Flory. With all the talks wrapped up at around 0500 pm Central European Standard Time, we decided to spend some time cleaning up after the attendees. Aoife Moloney, Richard Brown, Sandro, Justin W. Flory and I decided to get ourselves a commemorative photograph for the staff of the FOSDEM 2024 edition of Distributions Devroom. With some time left before departure, we decided to help the attendants at the colocated Ubuntu booth to pack things up.
I accompanied Adam Samalik to the rear entrance of building AW where we saw that even the Fedora Project and CentOS Project booths were wrapped up. We soon caught up with them in front of the building AW and after some commemorative photographs of the entire crew, we decided to head for the tram station. Michal Konecny, Noemi Halbichová, Fabian Arrotin, Tomas Hrcka and I reached back to our hotel at around 0600 pm Central European Standard Time and with the plans being made for a dinner with the CentOS Hyperscale contributors at around 0730 pm Central European Standard Time, we had roughly ninety minutes to spare.
Reconvening downstairs at the hotel lobby at around 0700 pm Central European Standard Time after getting freshened up, we departed for the Brussels Grand Place on foot. We met up with Davide Cavalca, Neal Gompa and a bunch of others contributing to both the CentOS Project and other Red Hat teams at the restaurant entrance. Michal Konecny, Noemi Halbichová and I decided to hang around there before heading inside with the remaining of them. As it started drizzling, we decided to not stay outside and meet up with Shaun McCance and Carl George who were seated inside - with whom we had discussions about a bunch of interesting topics.
Bunch of photographs taken while Michal Konecny, Noemi Halbichová and I were hanging out at Brussels Grand Place
While the bunch of us were struggling with the menus printed in the Dutch language, I ordered myself a main course meal consisting of Grilled Chicken and Potato fries alongside Red Bull for the beverage. We munched on the croquettes filled with cheese, fish and potatoes for the starters while we waited for the main course meal to be served. Tomas Hrcka left a bit early - following him, Michal Konecny, Noemi Halbichová and I left after the meals were through. On our way back, we decided to purchase some Belgium-themed fridge magnets and key rings as souvenirs for my family before heading to bed at around 1000 pm Central European Standard Time.
