FOSDEM 2016 – See you in Brussels

Over the weekend I read in the FT (paywall): Is Brussels safe? Ring a local resident to find out. I’m sure it will be fine, and you will want to be there for FOSDEM, happening 30-31 January 2016. 

There is the excellent one day track, that is the MySQL & Friends Devroom (site). Talks hail from Oracle, MariaDB Corporation, Percona and more. We don’t have a booth this year, but we do have amazingly good content on Saturday. I’m happy to have been part of the committee that chose the talks, but you know that this is a labour of love put on by Frédéric Descamps, Liz van Dijk, Dimitri Vanoverbeke, and Kenny Gryp. I’m sure the party will be awesome.

But that is not all! In the distributions devroom, you can see me give a talk at 11:00-11:20 titled Distributions from the view of a package. This is an important topic, because you start seeing MariaDB Server becoming the default in many distributions with the last holdout being Debian. But there is a lot of discussion, especially from the security standpoint there now, about MySQL overall. But that’s not the focus of my talk – I’m going to talk to you about how we, as upstream, have had to deal with distributions, changing requirements, etc. overall. I’ve done this since the MySQL days, so have quite a bit of experience dealing with it. 

If you are making software and want to be included and supported across all distributions, I highly recommend you coming to my talk. If you happen to decide to live in an ecosystem where there are forks, I also promise to make it useful for you.

And on Sunday, you will want to go visit the RocksDB Storage Engine for MySQL talk by none other than Yoshinori Matsunobu of Facebook. This will be at the main track and I highly recommend you visit it – I’m sure Sergei Petrunia will also make an appearance as he spends a lot of time on this too.

All in, I’m extremely excited to be at FOSDEM 2016. And you don’t need to ring a local resident to find out if its going to be safe/fun – come for the learning, stay for the beer ;-)


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