FOSDEM is done

That's it - FOSDEM is over for this year. I'm sitting at the airport waiting for my flight home, which should be boarding in about an hour.

I'd say this year was at least as good as last year. The general idea was the same - we had a booth where we sold merchandise and answered questions, and a devroom where we had a full track of talks. We sold slightly less than last year, mainly because we sold almost no t-shirts at all. We ran out of the blue elephants (as usual) and the mugs long before the conference was over. We had a lot of visitors to the booth, so I think we have to declare it a big success. And a great job by all our volunteers who spend the time there instead of browsing what else the conference had to offer. An extra kudos to Gevik who remembered to buy and bring snacks for all the booth people!

The devroom was much larger than last year, which was very good - on the saturday, we filled the room for almost every talk, and there is no way we could've put that many people in the room we had last year. The downside was that it was at the very other end of the conference area, so it was a pretty long walk from the booth (and from the main area of FOSDEM) to the devroom. I think this actually reduced the number of "spontaneous" people we got in there, so if t was closer we would've had even more.

We also had a major FAIL in that the projector didn't work. This was fixed fairly quickly by the FOSDEM staff (thanks!) with a mobile projector, but it left us with a very awkward keynote since we were late and not really ready. We also had a projector with too little light for the room, so we had to have the blinds down all day making the room dark and making it hard to open the windows for ventilation. but in the grand scheme of things, those are trivial issues!

The talk track was very good. My personal favorite (and I know I'm not alone in this) was Simon Riggs talk on replication. Simon's a very good speaker, and the topic is highly interesting. I also liked Heikkis talk about FSM and Visibility Map and Selenas usergroups talk. Well, I realliy liked all talks, but if I have to choose... I think the talk track this year was a clear step up from last year. Even though Greg Stark forgot one of his talks and didn't show up until it was time to take questions.. (sorry, Greg, but you're not getting away with that unpublished)

As for the social track - well, I have yet to be to a PostgreSQL conference (and I consider "our part of FOSDEM" to be a PostgreSQL conference) that did not have a good one, and this was certainly no exception. Great people to hang out with, good food, and good beer - what more can one ask for?

A big thanks to everybody who helped out with tihs conference - both the PostgreSQL specific parts, and the big thing! Already looking forward to coming back next year!

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