Intro: [SYN]

Last 7-8 March 2024 I was at Open Source Day 2024: a free conference organized by Schrodinger-Hat Open Source Community. Two days of talks, meeting old and new friends, networking and fun in a beautiful city.

Since the event was split into two tracks, I had to carefully choose which one to attend ; if you are interested all the sessions was recorded and live streamed.

Speaking of open source events, each talk proposal is simply an issue on a GitHub repository, and the selection was done by picking the ones with most “thumbs up” vote from the community.

I will just post here some highlights and musings, without any intention to detract from those I won’t mention 😄

First day: [SYN-ACK]

📜 PJ Hagerty made an examination of the history of Open Source; from naive days of “everything is free for everyone”, to the current status where Open Source have become financially a part of everything technology driven. Good hints about how to be a participant and good Open Source citizen.

🦀 Irine Kokilashvili introduced nanocl, a kubernetes replacement written in Rust started as a study project.

♿ Alessandro Albano talked about the importance of designing accessible and inclusive software.

🛡️ Abdel Sghiouar gave a wonderful talk about Software Supply Chain Security (SLSA, SBOM), why we should care and how it works in practice.

🛰️ Sal Kimmich brought us to the space, explaining how Linux has been adapted for use in extra terrestrial project, discussing both technical advancements and the broader implications for the open source community.

👾 followed also two afternoon talks about webassembly, a technology which is catching on. One from Sohan Maheshwar and other from Noah Jelich; Edoardo Dusi talk about WebAssembly on the next day as well.

👔 last but not least, Francesco Corti made us think about a simple question: where is Open Source going ? Is the model sustainable from a business perspective ?

Second Day: [ACK]

📈 Nathan Marrs told us the art of monetizing open-source projects without compromising their core principles, with the use case of real-world success story of Grafana.

⌨️ Noam Honig did a live coding session showing off the remult framework, for seamless backend-frontend integration and fast REST API development.

🔮 Christina Dahlén introduced lavinmq, an open source message broker engineered for optimal resource utilisation and high performance. As a Crystal language ambassador, I appreciated the use of this underrated language 😄

🐱 Schrödinger Hat team gave an historic retrospective of the team and a nice review of the last year of their activities.

🔬 Costa Tsaousis presented an in-depth overview of building Netdata, a powerful open-source, distributed observability pipeline designed to provide higher fidelity, easier scalability, and a lower cost of ownership compared to traditional monitoring solutions.

💾 Federico Terzi introduced Conflict-free Replicated Data Types in theory and practice. Awesome and easy to follow even for non-Javascript lovers!

🎸 Omar Diop Brought us on a musical journey through the world of open source software as he shared the story behind crafting from scratch an online guitar tuner.

🎤 Francesco Napoletano explained in a nice way how to fight ageism, and how an over 40 developer can still rock in 10 easy steps !

Goodbye [FIN]

A special thank you to all sponsors, in particular to SUSE for making this conference and my attendance possible. In the next picture you can see my awesome colleagues Giulio, Luca, and Stefano at SUSE booth. Good work guys!