I spent this weekend at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting. managed to see a bunch of familiar faces, meet some new people and have an all-around good time! Willow coordinated the trip, and brought a +1 (Jim, my beloved <3). I dragged Iris along with me.

this year, FOSDEM's was quite the experience. I didn’t expect to feel this fulfilled in such a short space of time, and Brussels is a beautiful city. I'd live there for a year, if I could. thank you to everyone who made FOSDEM perfect experience.

miscellanea

• found a good blog post on how LLMs and coding assistants starve public forums of good, interesting questions. that means only LLMs will know the answers to questions, given we're feeding them all our programming tasks. this has encouraged me to maybe write more here about what niggles I've run into while building things
• Mastodon announced an experiment to move away from recommending mastodon.social as the default server, instead testing out an approach which suggests a server based on geography and language. with the concentration of the Fediverse on mastodon.social, I consider this a big win

musings

• I really don't understand how some people are so good at shitposting. I've found an account super similar to dril on Fedi
• it's quite funny the people who identify most with how I feel might not read my blog, because they’ve got crippling, unmedicated ADHD
• the thing I love about Chaos-adjacent events is that there’s always another layer down, and there's always something you'll inevitably miss. it's always nice hearing what others got up to
• it's frustrating when I have a tightly scheduled day, and something knocks that entire schedule off kilter. I know the solution is to have a less tightly scheduled day, but I just don’t have the energy right now to leave the house multiple times in a week. that means I try to cram all my outside activities into one or two days, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't

misadventures

• this week's focus at work has been continuing on building out my CLI. internal tooling is pretty cool
• did a lot of my stuff outside on Monday
  • had an appointment with a consultant on Monday. I’ve suspected for a while, but the doctor's confirmed I might have to have surgery and I'm terrified. the doctor's sent off for scans and tests, which I'll book in soon
  • after the appointment, I went into work on Monday. I barely got anything done because I was busy being a menace. I take pity on my colleagues
    • for lunch, I got a chicken kebab box from a stall opposite the office. the rice was pleasantly spiced and the portions were hearty, so I'm rather happy. 10/10, would eat there again
    • more people at work are reading the blog. hi! welcome! I don't know why you'd like to expose yourself to these my lukewarm takes, but make yourself comfy
    • for the complete avoidance of doubt, I was productive at work on Monday. I find being in the office makes a dent in my output, but I got enough done. calling myself a "menace" is a joke (see #2).
  • as I was already in London, went to Campaign Lab in the evening on Monday. caught up with Kourosh and a few others I haven't seen since last year
• got Ollie a Royal Entomological Society (or "the bug club", as I affectionately call them) membership as a gift. I like him a lot, and I wanted him to have more structured activities to do with bugs (because he likes bugs a lot, even though I don't care for them much). I think he appreciated the gesture quite a bit.
• Ollie also wrote a newsletter based on my newsletter and its really cute and very comprehensive <3
• set up full text search with Mastodon on the way to crash a friend’s on Wednesday night. it was not as painful as I thought it'd be!
• slept over in central London on Wednesday night, and caught the Eurostar on Thursday morning. got into Brussels around 1115. the journey into Europe was rather smooth!
  • brought my neck pillow but didn’t use it, because the Eurostar's seats were rather comfy. however, the painfully slow connectivity on Eurostar quickly dispelled any fantasy of getting any work done. or communicating with anyone. I would argue no connectivity is better than slow connectivity, given you don’t obsess over trying to make it work
• Iris went to Rotterdam by accident and had to double back on herself. she took an extra two hours to get to Brussels, so I got something small to eat at Quick. we finally met up about 1315. because we got in a day before the rest of our group, we had to book a hostel
• caught the metro to our hostel, where we stayed in a dorm. this was my first time sleeping in a dorm with complete strangers (I don't count eth0, because that's a community event). it was an alright experience, and I'd probably do it again
• had dinner with Iris at Boullion Brussels, and I had cheese croquettes as a starter, meatballs in an onion sauce as a main and shared a salted caramel butter rice pudding. sadly, they lacked andalouse sauce or sauce frites, so it's a 4.5/5 for me.
• was propositioned by an older Tunisian man, and he was rather persistent despite the language barrier. I need to get a better strategy than smile and nod when I don’t understand something.
• met up with some friends on Friday!
  • headed to Forcado on Friday morning, one of a small chain of pastel de nata shop in Brussels. we met a guy in the hostel lobby, and brought him along to meet up with Ada. eventually convinced Connor and Alfie to join us.
  • after pastry, we headed to Delirium Taphouse for a bit, before picking up the Airbnb keys. the CO2 concentration in Delirium hit 6000+ ppm!
  • I could adjust individual radiators in Airbnb which was quite nice. curiously, there was also a GCHQ puzzle book in the Airbnb
  • after heading back to Delirium, I ended up on a Lebanese restaurant with Ada and Iris. Willow her +1 landed soon after and joined us. I had a beef schwarma wrap, chips, and some pineapple TOP juice in a pyramid carton (apparently it’s Lebanon’s Iconic Pyramid Drink). I convinced Iris to try andslouse and it measurably improved her life
• had a late start on Saturday, arrived at the ULB campus at around 1300.
  • I forgot how busy lunchtime gets, and the main concourse was packed. nabbed a bowl of green curry and rice for lunch. the green curry was unusually pale
  • despite being incredibly busy, Felix made it in on Saturday morning. managed to meet up with him, and it was good to see him!
  • bought some LED earrings for Willow. she quite liked them!
  • went to a few talks
    • The needs of civil institutions for The Next Socials, which talked about what public institutions need to make the most of the fediverse
    • A wild FASP appears! Integrating your app with Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers, for federated search and account recommendations
• Cave surveying - GIS with a Z-axis, which looked at the history of cave mapping and how cavers now use LIDAR to survey caves. they're now uploading that cave data to OpenStreetMap, too! I thought caving could be an interesting hobby, but then saw videos of people neck deep during the talk and I think it would be a terrible, terrible idea for me.
• Millipede and Centipede-RTK: centimeter-level GNSS positioning for the rest of us, for a project popular in Hungary and France which uses real-time kinetic GNSS backed by base stations for more accurate positioning
• got wrangled to dinner at a ramen place called Mendo with a few folks. I think I had creamy chicken ramen, but I didn’t bother translating the menu because I wanted to surprise myself. regardless, the place had plenty of character and I greatly enjoyed it
• headed to Bytenight, the FOSDEM afterparty. bumped into plenty of people, and it was nice to see everyone again
• had a lazy Sunday
  • I got home around 0500 after a late night, and crashed on the sofa. Iris got back in at about 1000. she wasn’t feeling too well when she got back, so I ordered some food in, fed her, tucked her in, and went back to bed to have a lie in.
  • rocked up at 1800 to help with teardown on Sunday, as I did last year. met some intersting people, including someone who's really into modding electric cars. after teardown, they fed us a meal and gave us some bus tickets to get home
  • eventually headed back to Delirium, eventuallu had afters at the Airbnb, ordered food, passed out curled up on the sofa. it wasn't as uncomfy as I thought it would be!