FOSDEM Summary:

I was invited to speak at FOSDEM this past weekend in Brussels, Belgium. (Too bad it conflicted with PyCon.) FOSDEM is an acronym for “Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting”. Richard Stallman had the opening keynote covering software patents, and Jeff Waugh from Canonical talked about why software freedom should be recognized and cherished by everyone, not just software developers. Both were excellent presentations.

Some Links:

FOSDEM web site: http://www.fosdem.org/2006

My presentation: http://jrandolph.com/selenium/fosdem2006/

Downloadable version: http://jrandolph.com/selenium/seleniumatfosdem_2006.zip

My speaker bio: http://www.fosdem.org/2006/index/speakers/speakers_huggins

More Detail on the Selenium Presentation:

The conference went well, and my presentation on Selenium was “respectably” attended (between 100 to 200 people is my rough guess). I was a little nervous when I found out I was presenting in the same big room as Stallman and Waugh– the room can hold about 1 to 2 thousand people, I think. The conference was mostly full of kernel and systems hackers from the various F/OSS Linux & BSD distros or higher frameworks (KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, etc.). But there was a “Web 2.0″ track, which was represented by me from the Selenium project, Alex Russell from the Dojo project, and Geert Bevin from the RIFE project.

Although this was an exceptionally geeky conference, only about 25% of the audience was familiar with Selenium, so I focused more on the “what’s” and “why’s” of Selenium, instead of diving into deep technical and integration issues. So, if you’d like me to speak on deep technical and integration issues involving Selenium, invite me or another developer from the Selenium project to speak somewhere and we’ll get right on it. ;-) Perhaps we should start our own “SeleniumCon” in Chicago this summer? :-)

The FOSDEM organizers did record video and audio for most of the presentations (including mine), but they didn’t have an exact time frame when those videos would be posted other than “soon”.