Journal

Brussels Again, But Make It Unplugged The day after FOSDEM, about a hundred of us gathered at Sparks Meeting on Rue Ravenstein in Brussels for OTel Unplugged EU 2026 — an unconference dedicated entirely to OpenTelemetry. Purple stage lights, a mid-century auditorium with wood paneling, and the familiar buzz of people who spend their days thinking about telemetry pipelines. If you know, you know. The format is simple: no prepared talks, no slides. Morning session brainstorming, dot-voting on topics, then self-organizing into nine rooms across four breakout slots. You vote with your feet. If a conversation isn’t working, you move. It’s chaotic, it’s honest, and it produces the kind of discussions that polished conference talks rarely achieve. ...

Another Year, Another FOSDEM FOSDEM — the annual Brussels pilgrimage. If you’ve been, you know the drill: too many talks, too little time, questionable coffee, and the kind of conversations that only happen when you pack thousands of open-source developers into a university campus in the dead of winter. This year was different for me, though. Two talks in two devrooms, three sessions at OTel Unplugged — and this time, I brought the whole family. My wife and our toddler (who has graduated from “can barely walk” to “can absolutely destroy a hotel room in under four minutes”) came along, and we turned it into a proper trip — FOSDEM, then a few days exploring Ghent and Antwerp before heading home. ...

Another Year, Another FOSDEM FOSDEM—the annual pilgrimage to Brussels for a weekend of open-source brilliance, hallway track magic, and the inevitable sleep deprivation. This year’s Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting was, as always, a whirlwind of ideas, people, and tech so bleeding-edge it practically needed bandages. But for me? It was all about seeing friends. Catching up, syncing, and squeezing in as many conversations as humanly possible. As we always say—the hallway track is the real conference. I’m beyond grateful for the people I managed to see, and equally bummed about those I missed. But with a toddler waiting at home, even carving out this limited time was a logistical miracle. ...