Looking back at FOSDEM’26

The FOSDEM conference is an incredible opportunity for our team to connect, learn, engage with our users, and participate in the broader open source community. Our experience actually started a day earlier, when we held an in-person meeting to discuss several technical priorities that we’re working on in 2026. As a remote team that doesn’t have many opportunities to sit down together in person, this made for a great start to the trip. 

The next morning, we arrived on campus early to set up our stand. It’s not so easy to get selected for a stand at FOSDEM, so we felt lucky to have this chance to showcase the Foundation. The best part of having a stand is that people know exactly where to find you among the swarming crowds of the conference. I was happy to get to connect with some of our generous funders, including Sovereign Tech Agency and Mercedes-Benz. 

It was great to have so many people visit the stand to say hello, learn about the project, subscribe to our newsletter, and give their feedback. I’m especially grateful to the handful of attendees who made financial donations to help support our work. We rely on gifts, grants, and sponsorship to fund everything we do, so every gift makes a difference! 

I saw lots of great talks this year. But it’s never possible to see all the talks one wants to see at FOSDEM, so I’ll be looking through my colleagues’ top picks and watching some recordings in the coming weeks. I will also be sure to look through the talks that were on in the Security devroom which our Chief Technology Officer, Tomáš Mráz, helped to organize.

Another big highlight of the conference was our community manager Jon Ericson’s talk about how Heartbleed was both the worst and the best thing to happen in OpenSSL’s history. This topic hits close to home for me, because Heartbleed was the event that led to me being hired into a full-time engineering role with OpenSSL! 

I already have FOSDEM pencilled into my calendar for January 2027 and look forward to continuing this annual tradition.