This year we co-organized the FOSDEM’17 Backup & Disaster Recovery Developer Room together with ReaR and BareOS projects.

Last year we attended FOSDEM’16 with a booth in the K building and this year we expected to have a booth again, shared with ReaR project, but it wasn’t accepted. We guess that having a Devroom was the point for the organization to give the chance to another project to be present with a booth. 

All DRLM team attended FOSDEM’17. On Friday morning we were leaving from Barcelona Airport and landed in Brussels around 15:00 P.M.

Still on Friday, in the evening, we were making the last adjustments to the DRLM Workshop before uploading the slides to the FOSDEM website, and after that, we didn’t miss the FOSDEM’17 Welcome Party held at the Delirium Café!

We were surprised that some people  were wearing DRLM project T-Shirts from last year! This was amazing for us! We enjoyed a few beers and met some friends there, but got back to the apartment soon because our Devroom schedule was on Saturday and we had to be at ULB Campus early to prepare the Devroom together with ReaR and BareOS guys.

On Saturday, at 9:30 A.M. we were at AW.121 room in ULB Campus to prepare all the stuff for the Workshop. It was a pleasure for us to co-organize the Devroom, being able to explain our project to the Open Source community and our first talk at FOSDEM exceeded our expectations.

 First talk was the DRLM Workshop, that gave us the opportunity to explain the project and to show how DRLM works to all people present in the room or those that were following the talk over the streaming platform. 

During the whole Saturday we were at the Devroom attending the other very interesting talks about ReaR, BareOS, … without time to lunch until 16:00 P.M. At that time we were really hungry and left the room 30 minutes to eat something in the food trucks area and came back to the Devroom with enough energy to be present at the closure talk regarding future ideas for ReaR, DRLM and BareOS.
It was pretty interesting and gave us the opportunity to explain our future ideas for DRLM and ReaR in order to go forward with a better integration on both projects. We received some interesting questions from the audience. Some of them in fact turned intonew points in the project todo-list! This kind of feedback becomes very important for the future of any project.

At the end of the talk all the organizers agreed that the Devroom must be repeated next year and all of us will be at FOSDEM’18 again. We were so tired and just came back to the apartment and went out for dinner, more relaxed and with the feel that the Devroom was a success.

On Sunday we had time to attend some talks and walk around the Stand areas, as last year was impossible because we were at the booth all the weekend. 

Finally we want to say thanks to the organization and the hundreds of volunteers, for their efforts to make possible the FOSDEM’17. Again, they held the largest concentration of Free Software communities in Europe, free and open access for all people. A greeting to all the friends we made, and those who shared a beer with us.