This weekend is the annual FOSDEM conference in Brussels. I really enjoy FOSDEM but, for reasons I don’t really understand, this will be the first time I’ve been since 2005. It will also be one of the rare occasions where I attend a conference without giving a talk – the organisers turned down my proposed talk on Modern Perl.

I like FOSDEM because it’s not just a Perl conference. It’s about the wider open source movement. In fact Perl is a really small part of of the conference. In many years it has been completely unrepresented. One of the things I mentioned in my “M Word” talk at the London Perl Workshop was that Perl needed to be better represented at non-Perl conferences. With that in mind, the Perl Foundation has booked a stand at the conference and various volunteers (including me) will be there telling people about how wonderful Perl is.

The main driver behind this push to get Perl represented at other conferences has been Gabor Szabo and he’ll also be at FOSDEM giving a couple of talks. One is a lightning talk introducing people to Padre. The other is about packaging CPAN modules for Linux distributions. Those of you with long memories might remember me talking about this at YAPC in Copenhagen. I’m hoping that attending Gabor’s talk will galvanise me into having another go at my project to automatically build RPMs of many more CPAN modules than are currently available.

So, as you can see, there are plenty of good reasons to be at FOSDEM this weekend. And that’s even before considering that it takes place in one of my favourite European cities. I might even treat myself to a Kwak in one of the bars on the Grand Place.

If you’re at FOSDEM next weekend, please stop by the Perl stand and say hello.