From OpenFest to Codebits or from Sofia to Lisbon

As described before, OpenFest is the annual gathering of fans, creators and supporters of open source in Sofia.

Unfortunately I had even more problems understanding the programme than usual. Cyrillic and I do not get on – so I will only tell you about the talks that kind of made sense to me. Michael Kerrisk’s talk seemed interesting: Why Kernel Space Sucks? (Or: Deconstructing two myths)(Or: Anabridged history of kernel-userspace interface blunders…). Philip Paeps (one of the Fosdem organiser among other things) gave a talk on Using FreeBSD in an Embedded Environment. I noticed that like everywhere else people here are concerned about the environment – Using Open Source Technologies to Create Enterprise Level Cloud System, Optimize your Costs and Offset your Carbon Footprint on the Environment by Венелин Горнишки, Илиян Стоянов.

After the event, we all meet at the Krivoto restaurant for beer and food, networking and discuss the talks of the day. You can guess what I did… tried to decipher the English menu.

Two days after Openfest, it’s Codebits time in Lisbon so instead of traveling home one day and flying to Lisbon the nest day, I decided to stay an extra day in Bulgaria thanks to my hosts Marian Marinov and his wife Toni. By the way Marian is the main organizer of OpenFest. We spent the day in Plovdiv, a charming city about 130 km East of Sofia with Roman ruins, typical Bulgarian architecture and much more. One should not forget that Bulgaria came under Ottoman rule for nearly five centuries which explains the presence of so many Mosques. More….

After Sofia – Lisbon for Codebits.

I arrived a little too early at the venue but I remembered that the out of hours entrance was in the basement – the security guards were very kind and gave me a chair so I could wait in confort. Who said that life at conferences is not charmed!