Everything started a few months ago when I checked my spam folder and there was a message that said, your talk at FOSSNorth was accepted, please confirm only if you are 100% sure you are coming. What a decision. I am never more than 60% sure in general, because anything can happen. How can I be 100% sure? I bought a plane ticket immediately. It turns out there was one low-cost airline offering direct flights between Prague and Gothenburg. Then I booked a hotel. A cheap one. Then I reserved the dates in my calendar as vacation days.
The loud voices at the airport made me think about that. I was on my way to FOSSNorth. My backpack full of stickers, my head full of some more exciting ideas on how to present my topic and my calendar booked with meetings.
The journey itself was bad. These days companies think about optimizing costs and not about the traveler experience. We saw this in the software industry as well. This approach would not work in the long term, but for now we all need to suffer.
Before
The city is amazing. I liked it more than Stockholm. Finding my way around was easy. Hearing a bus driver say “have a nice afternoon” is precious. Where I came from the bus driver rarely speaks and when they open their mouth you don’t want to be close.
My hotel was close to the rail tracks and was, as I said before, cheap. I was mostly happy with the breakfast where every morning I needed to choose what not to eat, as opposed to the majority of the hotels in the rest of Europe.
Food
After leaving my backpack, I needed food urgently. I opened my Organic Maps helper to find a restaurant worthy of my time. Whoa! I was surprised to find a Balkan restaurant within 800 meters. They were offering Ćevapčići pizza. I cannot explain why this offering made me cry a bit from happiness. I went to the restaurant expecting it to be empty. I was lucky to find a spot – it was full of people from all over the Balkans and even some locals.
I ordered the pizza and then the waiter put in front of me a big bowl of sour cabbage, some bread and butter. Yeeah!
The Oslo gang
After my belly was full, I went to meet with 3 amazing people from Oslo. How do I know them? A good question. A few weeks before the event, I posted on my Fediverse account – if someone was coming to the same event and would like to have a beer with me. I don’t like drinking alone :) Then one person replied and the magic happened. It turns out I would meet a Black Metal legend who happens to be a geek as well.
So we met at one of the breweries in the city and it turns out there were more people, all from Oslo. It was a long time since I met such nice people. We ended up talking about FreeBSD, retro computing, the Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator, and many other topics that you don’t need to know about.
The city
On the next day I went on a walking tour of Gothenburg. I remembered a few things:
- The people were to starve to death, but did not adopt potatoes as a food source until they realized they can make alcohol from it.
- The tallest building in all of Scandinavia will be opened in the city in June. It looks fantastic.
- People felt offended by the posture of their former kings’ monuments, so they did something about it.
- You cannot buy alcohol in every store.
- To see the remains of the old city walls, you have two choices – to go in an underground garage or to buy a ticket to a cinema.
- Fika is the best. I am so adopting this behavior!
- The beer is very expensive. The Czech beers are super popular and cost at least 3 times more in a pub than in Prague.
The conference!
On the day before the conference, the organizers had a community day meetup in a pub. What a great idea. I met with a lot of people while chatting about free software topics. There were people from Greece, Romania and all of Scandinavia. I even was able to launch my campaign against the “Smart phone Zombies”.
The conference was amazing. Here are my unstructured thoughts:
- The venue – the Chalmers university – was great. One of the most comfortable chairs I ever sat on in my life. Also everything was well designed for an event of that scale. I also learned about two of their alumni – the Nobel winner Nils Gustaf Dalén and the first Swedish female engineer Vera Sandberg.
- Some of the talks I visited were too commercial for me, but I learned something new from them as well.
- There was one speaker that did their slides with Claude – I think this is a no-go for me. Even plain text would be better.
- The opportunities to talk to people were amazing. You just stop by anyone and say hi. People were friendly.
- My talk went well. I wish I had more time to move everything under reveal.js slides, so I can play more heavy metal. Also we had great side discussions on privacy and freedom.
- Even though there were many people with a Fediverse account, I didn’t see much posting about the event. Actually this might be good, because people were focused on what was discussed in the talks and not browsing constantly.
- The whole organization was optimized to perfection – at least from what I saw.
I will stop here. My energy went down after so much writing and remembering stuff. I would recommend visiting, presenting, and sponsoring the event with all my fingers.
Connect
If you were there and you want to connect with me – email me at bogomil at this website or DM me via my mastodon account.