on Friday, I flew to Brussels, Belgium for my first international trip of the year. I joined many of the people who contribute to open source on a university campus in Brussels for two days for FOSDEM.

the whole conference was very chaotic and overwhelming, but still a brilliant experience that I’d recommend to anyone. I want to share a few things I found helpful, and what I wish I'd known before going to FOSDEM for the first time.

if you'd like another first-timer's feelings on FOSDEM 2025, check out Terence Eden's blog post.

bring the essentials.

when packing your bags for your trip, you should carry the absolute necessities. the ULB campus is located quite a distance from Brussels' city centre, so you can't pop out to buy anything you need.

bring a water bottle. every vending machine I checked was sold out of water, the queues for the FOSDEM-run cafes and bars are always run very long and the on-site food vendors on site frequently run out of water. I didn't drink enough and paid the price, with headaches and thirst for the entire weekend.

if you don't like queues and crowds, consider bringing food with you. by the time I realise I'm hungry, it's often too late. I had to wade through crowds while figuring out what I wanted to eat, and then queue for 20 to 30 minutes. that being said, the variety of the food on site was really good!

bring hand cream. something in the Belgian water dries out my hands, so I found benefit in my small tube of Body Shop hand cream.

bring a power bank and bring chargers. you will likely run out of power, especially if you're using your phone to plan which sessions to go to and coordinate with others.

finally, bring a physical payment card. public transportation uses tap-to-pay, and if your phone dies, you don't want to be stranded! I also found it surprising that Brussels Airlines only accepted physical payment cards.

have an idea of what you want to get out of it.

after you've packed your bags, spend some time figuring out what you want to get out of FOSDEM. nothing's worse than going to a massive conference with thousands of people and having no clue what you'd like to get out of it. if you're going to FOSDEM (especially if it's for your first time!), you should have some goal that drives what you do, where you go and the sessions you plan to attend.

your goal could be anything, from meeting your Internet friends, to learning about a new framework or discussing a specific technology with other people really interested in it. there just has to be a point to it all. my goal for this year was to I wanted to find an open source project to contribute to, and so a lot of what I did was in pursuit of that. I was successful!

it's organised chaos. to have the best experience, embrace it.

aimlessly exploring the campus won't work, because FOSDEM is organised chaos. this year, there were 1195 speakers who delivered 1105 talks on 70 tracks, along with 88 stands from organisations, companies and projects. I didn't realise its scale until I was there in person.

it's absolutely massive and you should accept the fact you'll miss something cool. you might be tempted to optimise your day, such that you hit all the stuff you're interested in, but you should go with the flow. all the talks are recorded, so don't stress if you can't make it into a session that seems interesting.

I found the most interesting conversations I had came from when I was on my way between two talks, on the good old hallway track. many people had something shiny-looking that caught my eye, and I'd stop and speak to them about it.

to be clear, I don't think the hallway track is a replacement for the phenomenal talks and you should absolutely make an effort to go. however, having conversations with complete strangers was a big part of the event for me. I also managed to bump into a few friends, including the phenomenal Ryan Lee!

the best way to strike up conversation was based on what's on their shirt or the stickers on their laptop. the people who go to FOSDEM are really friendly and like when others are interested in their open source niche, and they're almost always down to talk to you about it. if someone approaches you and you get excited about what you like, it does tend to feel like you're trying to be friends at them. however, they wouldn't ask if they didn't want conversation, so go wild!

bring stickers to trade.

making friends as an adult is hard, but it's useful to remember people like shiny things. interesting stickers are like catnip to the people at FOSDEM, and they're incredibly useful for striking up a conversation. bring your own stickers to trade, and collect as many as you can from the stalls around the site. people like stickers and they're guaranteed to be an instant hit.

you probably won't have a clue what someone you bump into is talking about. and that's okay.

in conversation, we depend on a shared set of knowledge. it can get uncomfortable if we don't have much of the knowledge necessary to continue smoothly.

when speaking to someone at FOSDEM, you might feel somewhat out of your depth. this is a given when you're starting out in your career, and you're expected not to know things. however, it feels particularly awkward when you consider yourself a smart cookie and you feel you're meant to know stuff. I found myself feeling slightly more awkward each time I had to respond "no" when someone asked me "do you know how X works?", "are you familiar with Y?" or "do you know Z?".

my feeling of discomfort comes from being chastised in at previous jobs for asking "stupid" or "elementary" questions, and I'm sure many feel similarly. miscommunication is the root of all evil (at least in engineering), and so I take my time to thoroughly understand how systems work and the assumptions people make when they think about technical systems. I don't like not knowing things. if you pair discomfort that with the added stress of interacting with a complete stranger you want to make a good impression on, and the pressure you put on yourself can be immense.

remember that FOSDEM is full of smart people, and it's normal to feel intimidated. the person who's casually engaging with you in conversation about Arch Linux, or Rust's borrow checker, or Linux on Android, or the internals of multipath TCP, or the implementation details of ActivityPub, or whatever it is has spent a lot more time than you thinking about these things. they're not interrogating you to find out whether you're smart enough to speak to, but they're simply excited to share their knowledge.

you might have a few doubts about whether you're "nerdy enough" to be there, but you probably are given you've caught a plane, or bus, or coach, or train, or bike to go to the largest conference of open source devs on Earth.

do a fringe event.

meeting people in the chaos of a conference environment can be difficult, so it might help to go to a fringe event. the FOSDEM website lists plenty of events which take place either around the time of the conference, or during the conference itself.

these include hackathons, dinners, meet-ups and evening events. I find these events are a lot calmer than the main conference, and you can get to know people better. you'll probably be able to find an event on niche you're interested in, and you'll meet like-minded people who you can make friends with.

if you're worried about getting around Brussels, it's a very walkable city and you'll be fine as along as you have a working knowledge of English, French or Dutch.

check your group chats and community spaces.

open source projects often have places where they coordinate and coalesce. most projects use Discord, although some use IRC and Matrix. you also probably have a couple of really nerdy group chats.

let people know you're going to FOSDEM, as someone else will likely be there! I met up with the creator of Cooklang, an open source recipe markup language, all because he sent a message in the community Discord server.

find someone to coordinate with, before, during and after the event.

travelling with others to conferences is much more fun, and can make the whole experience less overwhelming. there's a lot of people at FOSDEM, and trying to go it alone, especially for your first time, could be difficult.

having a friend to coordinate with you makes sure someone's got your back. It also makes travel and accommodation arrangement easier, and probably cheaper. if you have a friend whose interests don't overlap with yours, you can be nudged in the direction of talks you wouldn't normally consider during the conference. your friend can also help you make friends, by making friends themselves! there's strength in numbers.

once you've left FOSDEM and you're heading home, it's pleasant to have someone to reflect on the event with. I know I tend to have a noticeable drop in energy and mood after large events, so it's nice to have someone to keep me company and check I'm doing okay.

a quick note to those travelling from the UK! unless you’re booking about two or three months in advance, the Eurostar isn’t economical. I found it cheaper (and arguably more comfortable) to fly. that being said, some people I know are hardcore FOSDEMmers, and coordinate Eurostar trips and dinner on the Saturday. your travel experience will depend heavily on your friend group. 

know your limits.

this is easy to overlook in all the excitement, but take care of yourself physically. it's tempting to get there bright and early, scuttle around the ULB campus all day and then try to head Bytenight, a fringe event, meetup or dinner. however, you probably won't be able to do it all, and that's okay. running around all day is exhausting, and you should go to bed earlier.

a fun point for UK-based readers: the booze on the continent is stronger. as the UK levies tax on alcohol in a way that means drinks are taxed more the stronger they get. that means brewers save money by decreasing the amount of alcohol in a drink. this can even be true across the same brands, where Stella Artrois sold in the UK has (at time of writing) 4.6% alcohol by volume, but has 5.2% alcohol by volume in Belgium. if you drink alcohol, you'll benefit a lot from pacing yourself.

wear comfortable shoes.

FOSDEM occupies 35 rooms across 5 buildings on the ULB's massive Solbosch Campus. the sessions you'll want to go to will likely be in different buildings pretty far from each other, and you'll be doing plenty of walking. I'm glad I brought my hiking boots, as they're reasonably comfortable and my feet didn't hurt too badly after the event.

don't meticulously plan.

you'll get distracted. you'll get hungry. you'll get tired. You'll miss a session because you bumped into someone you haven't seen in aaaaages and you want to catch up. or, worst of all, the session you really want to go to might be full. I found I didn't really stick to my plans for the Saturday and Sunday, but that's what made FOSDEM so fun!

I used Sojourner to bookmark interesting sessions and give me a loose idea of what to do with my time. I found it useful to plan to be in at least three places at once, as if I missed a session or realised I couldn't get there in time, I could keep my momentum going and have some sense of direction. next time, I'd want to spend more time going around the stalls and speaking to people, though! I feel I missed out on a few interesting people by being too focussed on heading to talks.

give yourself a degree of flexibility for the evening, too! I found that on all three nights I was in Brussels, I had something to do. leave yourself open to get dinner with old friends, head to Bytenight or sleep early.

volunteer for teardown, if you get the opportunity.

if you're willing and able, volunteer to help tear the conference down. I spent some time cleaning the Janson auditorium and the K building after the closing ceremony. in exchange, I got free food, some volunteer shirts (which were much appreciated, as I missed out on the FOSDEM merch), and even got to keep a banner from one of the auditoriums! many hands make the load light, and this is especially true at FOSDEM.

closing thoughts

in short, FOSDEM was an epic experience; it feels like I'm at home. it made me happy that for two days, I was surrounded by people just as nerdy as me and with interests similar to mine. although it does feel intimidating following in the footsteps of some of the greatest open source devs ever to grace software, the community is friendly and welcoming.

thank you to Willow for inviting me this year, and making my experience memorable.