7 ms·

I Went to FOSDEM

72 points by leejo 3y ago

gamache 3y ago
> Live Demos > Don’t do it. Really, don’t do it. Anyone that has been giving tech talks for a while now knows not to do it. Don’t do it. A few years ago, I found myself in San Francisco right on time to see Larry Wall give a talk announcing the release of Perl 6, and showing off some of its (abundant) features. Larry Wall did the entire presentation in Vim, including live coding. It's not that no one can pull this off, it's just that most of us aren't them :)
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yeah, there's a certain demo gods category who can usually make it work. But it's also sort of showing off. And I'm also somewhat unconvinced about how much demos add to a presentation a lot of the time.
- stavros 3y ago
  https://gitlab.com/stavros/itsalive https://gitlab.com/stavros/itsalive
- bertil 3y ago
  In the Python world, James Powell is famous for breezing through a combination of vim (the editor) and wat (the tutorial by absurd) with a lot of custom command line tools and even examples that feel at the same time immoral, hilarious, and perfectly crafted. There’s a reason his GitHub handle and his company are called “Don’t use this code.” He’s switched to analytical SQL lately, which is less prone to comedy but still very virtuoso.
- reaperman 3y ago
  David Beazley does a great job with live demos as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k
  - anitil 3y ago
    Some of his live demos take my breath away. I have to make notes to myself like "click the 'upload' button" so I don't forget during a presentation. It's like my brain switches to a mode where simple tasks are impossible
- bsder 3y ago
  > It's not that no one can pull this off, it's just that most of us aren't them :) The issue is that live demos require INSANE amounts of prep. You have to go over it. Then you go over it again. Then you go over it again with a stopwatch. Then you go over it again. Then you kill the network and go over it again. Then you go over it again with a stopwatch. Then you go over it with a friend with a stopwatch. Then you go over it again. Then you go over it with a friend but you use the stopwatch with no network. Then you go over it again. Repeat until you feel like you're in Groundhog Day. Then go over it one more time. By the time you give the demo in front of people, you should be so damn bored with giving it that the only reason you want to give the talk is to see the audience reaction.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    And then Windows 95 BSODs and gains more and better publicity than if the show had gone smoothly.
- nestorD 3y ago
  In my experience (I gave a demo as part of a talk today! It went great!), you want your code to be reliable (obviously... a 1 in 5 failure rate will bite you back on demo day), require as little thinking as possible (that can be worked around with increased automation, but if you automate all the things, you might as well be showing a recording), and rehearse things extensively (this applies to every part of a talk anyway).
  - kevincox 3y ago
    Also rehearse on a specific commit/build. I've seen so many cases where a feature or two were added since rehearsal and about was introduced into the demo path. If you do want to fix something for the demo run through your rehearsal another few times on the new commit.
- hodgesrm 3y ago
  > It's not that no one can pull this off, it's just that most of us aren't them : Having just done a talk at FOSDEM 2024 the main reason not to do a demo is that the slots in most devrooms are really short. In the monitoring devroom talks were in 30 minute slots, which included audio setup, talk, questions. Live demos can really enhance a presentation to developers but trying squeeze them into an already short slot can muddy the message. I would rather point the audience to examples they can run themselves. On a related point, I find recorded demos pretty horrible. The pleasure in demos is seeing the presenter work fluently with technology and the audience at the same time: "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!" as Gerard Manley Hopkins memorably phrased it. [0] It's showmanship and existence proof combined--and the most powerful rhetorical device to make technical points. The best ones are legend. [1] [0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
- librasteve 3y ago
  Larry is a genius and perl6 (now raku) does indeed abound with features. The idea aiui was to minimize the need for external dependencies in most code bases and to bring together all the features into "v1" rather than suffer from bolt on features and shoehorned syntax down the road.
vilunov 3y ago
The ventilation in rooms was absolutely terrible, especially in building H. Rooms in K and U had windows which could be opened, but even that didn't help much. It's not much of a surprise that many people become sick after FOSDEM.
- cnkk 3y ago
  Unfortunately, this has always been a problem there..
ocal5 3y ago
Thank you for these nice quality images and words > a) remove the card fees, and b) increase the likely hood of the customer leaving a tip. c) to avoid taxes : )
evrimoztamur 3y ago
Hah, funny anecdote about the 'card machine doesn't work' at the restaurant bit. We had the same happen to us in an Indian spot in the city centre. I also didn't question it, I understand why.
gumby 3y ago
For basically every conference I go to the hallway track is everything. Most talks aren't worth my time listening to (read the paper, if there is one) but the hallway...sublime, else I'm at the wrong conference. This also means I'm astonished when people show up when I am speaking.
- davidw 3y ago
  I still haven't seen a "conference done right for the internet age" although I admit I haven't been to any lately... Most talks are just a slow rendition of something I could have read faster. The questions could have been emails or forum posts, with code examples. Meeting people and exchanging ideas is nice in person, though and can often lead to fun, more spontaneous conversations.
seabass-labrax 3y ago
> The tram system didn’t require any faffing around - tap your debit/credit card. There’s a maximum charge per day. It’s probably cheaper if you purchase something in advance but didn’t seem worth it. Nope, that's the way to do it: it's more expensive if you buy the ticket in advance. There are also dozens of billboards declaring that 'your bank card is your ticket', yet, strangely, only perhaps 1% of people use them. When paying by bank card, a single journey is €2.10, with a maximum daily price of €7.50. When purchasing a paper ticket, a single journey is €2.60, but the day ticket is a flat €8.00. Thus, you can commit in advance to buying the day pass, but it's not cheaper than the maximum daily fare with a bank card. With a 'Brupass', you additionally have access to the wider network operated by De Lijn and TEC, as well as regional trains by SNCB/NMBS; effectively, this the 'outer zone' ticket for Brussels. You probably won't need these, because the STIB/MVIB zone alone is very large. The standard Brupass is €2.40 for a single journey and €8.40 for a day ticket. You'll also need to purchase an electronic MOBIB card separately, costing an additional €5.00. Brupass tickets do have discounts for bulk purchases (for instance, purchasing 100 single tickets in advance), but these aren't particularly big savings. In conclusion, you will only save money by buying in advance if: - you intend to use the wider Brussels transport network for the majority of days that you are in Brussels, or - you are eligible for a residents', concessionary or employment offer - although if so, don't you already know about this? :) - and you load tickets onto your personal MOBIB card, or - you are going to make close to a hundred journeys, either on STIB/MVIB or with a Brupass. I think the message they are very strongly trying to make is: don't bother ;) My funny story about that: the police and STIB/MIVB did a spot ticket inspection whilst I was on the tram after FOSDEM. When I showed the officer my VISA bank card, he stared at it for a second, then excitedly called down the tram to his colleague, saying something along the lines of "Pierre, come here! Quickly! We have a bank card!" - upon which, the one person carrying the special bank card validator came to check my fare. So there we have it - despite being the cheaper and less complicated option, a passenger paying by bank card is unusual enough to be the highlight of a Belgian police officer's day!
- em-bee 3y ago
  so i have to pay extra if i want anonymity?
siwatanejo 3y ago
Why is there not a single talk about bitcoin? You know, y'all, it is also an opensource project.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  Each 'devroom' has a different set of organisers, and it's up to them which talks they allow. There's a 'call for devrooms' in the Autumn of the year before, so someone could at that point propose a blockchain or cryptocurrency devroom. There was in fact one blockchain-related presentation at FOSDEM 2024, in the DNS devroom: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2198-the-first-13-years-of-blockchain-name-systems/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2198-the-...
  - siwatanejo 3y ago
    Nice find! will watch, thnku
raybb 3y ago
The system of recording and making the videos available is quite impressive. I saw quite a few people sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall right outside of talks and watching them on their phone if the room was full. The network didn't seem to even blip as far as I could tell. I also wrote about my FOSDEM experience this year. In summary, it was a little hard connecting to people without already knowing someone there but I still had a nice time in general and learned about some nice stuff like Open Food Facts, PassBolt, and Vale.sh. Looking forward to going again next year. If I'm lucky maybe even give a talk about something, I've really been enjoying coolify this year and maybe the creator would welcome a guest speaker sharing it :) https://blog.rayberger.org/fosdem-2024 https://blog.rayberger.org/fosdem-2024
aredox 3y ago
> The restaurant we went to on Sunday evening claimed their card machine wasn’t working, despite me having seen them use it with another customer successfully only ten minutes before. “Conveniently” there was an ATM across the street from the restaurant. Wait, isn't that that euronet quasi-scam, which they do with the complicity of local businesses? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38343352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38343352
- leejo 3y ago
  Almost certainly that as well - when I hopped across the street I wondered if there was complicity. It was just all too convenient. Had the machine not featured a contactless card reader, so possibly been a skimming scam, I would have raised hell, very loudly, in French and English, in the middle of the (now busier) restaurant. The cost I shrugged off, the conversion was from CHF to EUR so it still cost half what an equivalent meal would have cost back home.

72 points by leejo 3y ago

> Live Demos > Don’t do it. Really, don’t do it. Anyone that has been giving tech talks for a while now knows not to do it. Don’t do it. A few years ago, I found myself in San Francisco right on time to see Larry Wall give a talk announcing the release of Perl 6, and showing off some of its (abundant) features. Larry Wall did the entire presentation in Vim, including live coding. It's not that no one can pull this off, it's just that most of us aren't them :)

ghaff 3y ago
Yeah, there's a certain demo gods category who can usually make it work. But it's also sort of showing off. And I'm also somewhat unconvinced about how much demos add to a presentation a lot of the time.
stavros 3y ago
https://gitlab.com/stavros/itsalive https://gitlab.com/stavros/itsalive
bertil 3y ago
In the Python world, James Powell is famous for breezing through a combination of vim (the editor) and wat (the tutorial by absurd) with a lot of custom command line tools and even examples that feel at the same time immoral, hilarious, and perfectly crafted. There’s a reason his GitHub handle and his company are called “Don’t use this code.” He’s switched to analytical SQL lately, which is less prone to comedy but still very virtuoso.
reaperman 3y ago
David Beazley does a great job with live demos as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k
- anitil 3y ago
  Some of his live demos take my breath away. I have to make notes to myself like "click the 'upload' button" so I don't forget during a presentation. It's like my brain switches to a mode where simple tasks are impossible
bsder 3y ago
> It's not that no one can pull this off, it's just that most of us aren't them :) The issue is that live demos require INSANE amounts of prep. You have to go over it. Then you go over it again. Then you go over it again with a stopwatch. Then you go over it again. Then you kill the network and go over it again. Then you go over it again with a stopwatch. Then you go over it with a friend with a stopwatch. Then you go over it again. Then you go over it with a friend but you use the stopwatch with no network. Then you go over it again. Repeat until you feel like you're in Groundhog Day. Then go over it one more time. By the time you give the demo in front of people, you should be so damn bored with giving it that the only reason you want to give the talk is to see the audience reaction.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  And then Windows 95 BSODs and gains more and better publicity than if the show had gone smoothly.
nestorD 3y ago
In my experience (I gave a demo as part of a talk today! It went great!), you want your code to be reliable (obviously... a 1 in 5 failure rate will bite you back on demo day), require as little thinking as possible (that can be worked around with increased automation, but if you automate all the things, you might as well be showing a recording), and rehearse things extensively (this applies to every part of a talk anyway).
- kevincox 3y ago
  Also rehearse on a specific commit/build. I've seen so many cases where a feature or two were added since rehearsal and about was introduced into the demo path. If you do want to fix something for the demo run through your rehearsal another few times on the new commit.
hodgesrm 3y ago
> It's not that no one can pull this off, it's just that most of us aren't them : Having just done a talk at FOSDEM 2024 the main reason not to do a demo is that the slots in most devrooms are really short. In the monitoring devroom talks were in 30 minute slots, which included audio setup, talk, questions. Live demos can really enhance a presentation to developers but trying squeeze them into an already short slot can muddy the message. I would rather point the audience to examples they can run themselves. On a related point, I find recorded demos pretty horrible. The pleasure in demos is seeing the presenter work fluently with technology and the audience at the same time: "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!" as Gerard Manley Hopkins memorably phrased it. [0] It's showmanship and existence proof combined--and the most powerful rhetorical device to make technical points. The best ones are legend. [1] [0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
librasteve 3y ago
Larry is a genius and perl6 (now raku) does indeed abound with features. The idea aiui was to minimize the need for external dependencies in most code bases and to bring together all the features into "v1" rather than suffer from bolt on features and shoehorned syntax down the road.

vilunov 3y ago

The ventilation in rooms was absolutely terrible, especially in building H. Rooms in K and U had windows which could be opened, but even that didn't help much. It's not much of a surprise that many people become sick after FOSDEM.

cnkk 3y ago
Unfortunately, this has always been a problem there..

ocal5 3y ago

Thank you for these nice quality images and words > a) remove the card fees, and b) increase the likely hood of the customer leaving a tip. c) to avoid taxes : )

evrimoztamur 3y ago

Hah, funny anecdote about the 'card machine doesn't work' at the restaurant bit. We had the same happen to us in an Indian spot in the city centre. I also didn't question it, I understand why.

gumby 3y ago

For basically every conference I go to the hallway track is everything. Most talks aren't worth my time listening to (read the paper, if there is one) but the hallway...sublime, else I'm at the wrong conference. This also means I'm astonished when people show up when I am speaking.

davidw 3y ago
I still haven't seen a "conference done right for the internet age" although I admit I haven't been to any lately... Most talks are just a slow rendition of something I could have read faster. The questions could have been emails or forum posts, with code examples. Meeting people and exchanging ideas is nice in person, though and can often lead to fun, more spontaneous conversations.

seabass-labrax 3y ago

> The tram system didn’t require any faffing around - tap your debit/credit card. There’s a maximum charge per day. It’s probably cheaper if you purchase something in advance but didn’t seem worth it. Nope, that's the way to do it: it's more expensive if you buy the ticket in advance. There are also dozens of billboards declaring that 'your bank card is your ticket', yet, strangely, only perhaps 1% of people use them. When paying by bank card, a single journey is €2.10, with a maximum daily price of €7.50. When purchasing a paper ticket, a single journey is €2.60, but the day ticket is a flat €8.00. Thus, you can commit in advance to buying the day pass, but it's not cheaper than the maximum daily fare with a bank card. With a 'Brupass', you additionally have access to the wider network operated by De Lijn and TEC, as well as regional trains by SNCB/NMBS; effectively, this the 'outer zone' ticket for Brussels. You probably won't need these, because the STIB/MVIB zone alone is very large. The standard Brupass is €2.40 for a single journey and €8.40 for a day ticket. You'll also need to purchase an electronic MOBIB card separately, costing an additional €5.00. Brupass tickets do have discounts for bulk purchases (for instance, purchasing 100 single tickets in advance), but these aren't particularly big savings. In conclusion, you will only save money by buying in advance if: - you intend to use the wider Brussels transport network for the majority of days that you are in Brussels, or - you are eligible for a residents', concessionary or employment offer - although if so, don't you already know about this? :) - and you load tickets onto your personal MOBIB card, or - you are going to make close to a hundred journeys, either on STIB/MVIB or with a Brupass. I think the message they are very strongly trying to make is: don't bother ;) My funny story about that: the police and STIB/MIVB did a spot ticket inspection whilst I was on the tram after FOSDEM. When I showed the officer my VISA bank card, he stared at it for a second, then excitedly called down the tram to his colleague, saying something along the lines of "Pierre, come here! Quickly! We have a bank card!" - upon which, the one person carrying the special bank card validator came to check my fare. So there we have it - despite being the cheaper and less complicated option, a passenger paying by bank card is unusual enough to be the highlight of a Belgian police officer's day!

em-bee 3y ago
so i have to pay extra if i want anonymity?

siwatanejo 3y ago

Why is there not a single talk about bitcoin? You know, y'all, it is also an opensource project.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
Each 'devroom' has a different set of organisers, and it's up to them which talks they allow. There's a 'call for devrooms' in the Autumn of the year before, so someone could at that point propose a blockchain or cryptocurrency devroom. There was in fact one blockchain-related presentation at FOSDEM 2024, in the DNS devroom: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2198-the-first-13-years-of-blockchain-name-systems/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2198-the-...
- siwatanejo 3y ago
  Nice find! will watch, thnku

raybb 3y ago

The system of recording and making the videos available is quite impressive. I saw quite a few people sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall right outside of talks and watching them on their phone if the room was full. The network didn't seem to even blip as far as I could tell. I also wrote about my FOSDEM experience this year. In summary, it was a little hard connecting to people without already knowing someone there but I still had a nice time in general and learned about some nice stuff like Open Food Facts, PassBolt, and Vale.sh. Looking forward to going again next year. If I'm lucky maybe even give a talk about something, I've really been enjoying coolify this year and maybe the creator would welcome a guest speaker sharing it :) https://blog.rayberger.org/fosdem-2024 https://blog.rayberger.org/fosdem-2024

aredox 3y ago

> The restaurant we went to on Sunday evening claimed their card machine wasn’t working, despite me having seen them use it with another customer successfully only ten minutes before. “Conveniently” there was an ATM across the street from the restaurant. Wait, isn't that that euronet quasi-scam, which they do with the complicity of local businesses? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38343352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38343352

leejo 3y ago
Almost certainly that as well - when I hopped across the street I wondered if there was complicity. It was just all too convenient. Had the machine not featured a contactless card reader, so possibly been a skimming scam, I would have raised hell, very loudly, in French and English, in the middle of the (now busier) restaurant. The cost I shrugged off, the conversion was from CHF to EUR so it still cost half what an equivalent meal would have cost back home.