Data vibes: What’s good at FOSDEM 2026 and beyond?

FOSDEM and its gaggle of colocated events, meetups and more is upon us! FOSDEM is regularly one of my favorite events of the year to attend and support. Mostly for my own benefit, here’s what’s on and interesting in the data space across the week across the data engineering and cloud computing spaces?

I’ll divide this list into three categories: pre-FOSDEM weekend, FOSDEM devrooms and stands, and post-FOSDEM weekend. A 🌟indicates something I know I’ll be attending. I realize it’s a bit dangerous to signal my location on the internet in advance of being there. Please don’t be weird.

Not all events listed are official FOSDEM Fringe events, and not all events are in Brussels. But most are!

Pre-FOSDEM

January 29

• CHAOSScon 2026 : (Brussels, BE, registration required, €10): Consistently one of the friendliest communities in open source. Go learn about some valuable tooling!
• preFOSDEM MySQL Belgian Days (Brussels, bE, registration required, free, 2 day event until January 30)

January 30

• 🌟 FOSDEM PgDay (Brussels, BE, registration required, €75): This is the only dedicated Postgres event at FOSDEM this year, as the Postgres devroom did not get accepted. I’m a co-organizer and will be room hosting one of the two tracks in the morning, so come say hello!
• DuckDB developer meeting 1 (Amsterdam, NL, registration required, free)
• Swift Pre-FOSDEM Community Event (Brussels, BE, registration required, free): Two of my favorites, Paris Pitmann and Karen Chu, currently run the Swift community for Apple and they’ve done excellent work with an already friendly community. Go support them!
• Apache Iceberg™ Meetup Belgium: FOSDEM Edition (Brussels, BE, registration required, free): Go visit Danica Fine, my manager! Everyone I’ve encountered from the Iceberg community is great, and this should be a fun event.
• ATProto Meetup (Brussels, BE, registration recommended, free): Lots of cool stuff happening in this project right now, and if I had the time I’d love to be a fly on the wall.
• 🌟 Delirium Alley: Every year I hate the crowds and the noise and the lack of cell reception, and every year I find myself drawn back like a moth to a flame.

FOSDEM weekend

It’s around this point in the weekend where you really start to wish you could be in 5 places at once.

January 31 - Main conference

• Main track: FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI, Michiel Leenaars (Janson, 10:00-10:50): Micheal Leenaars is certainly one of the right voices to speak on this topic, at an inflection point in our global history. The summary for this talk reads less like an abstract and more like a terrifying manifesto.
• 🌟 Databases Devroom (all day, UB2.252A (Lameere) : This is the big one on Saturday, and one of my good friends Floor Drees at EDB is one of the CFP committee, so you’d better be extra nice! Here’s the talks I’m most tuned in for:
  • PostgreSQL and MySQL, Two Databases, Three Perspectives : This reminds me of a talk I’ve been giving at a few London meetups comparing Apache Iceberg, Postgres and Apache Kafka (and analyzing the differences in design trends/technical priorities at the time they were incepted). Very excited to see this as a result.
  • “Drop-in Replacement”: Defining Compatibility for Postgres and MySQL Derivatives : The Postgres and MySQL comparisons continue. Jimmy is a sweetheart and a detailed speaker, so this should prove to be an excellent tear-down.
  • Jack of all trades: query federation in modern OLAP databases : I had the pleasure of seeing Nicoleta deliver this talk late last year in Fresha’s London offices. Very technical!
  • Data on Kubernetes / stateless storage : data services are still one of cloud computing’s biggest challenges, due to data needing to.. Well, persist.
  • Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores : Josh is a great presenter and perhaps more importantly loves observability tooling. He’s well equipped to give a great talk on the topic.
• AI Plumbers Devroom (all day, UD2.120 Chavanne): another big topic with an all-day devroom. I’m neutral on AI these days, but it’s definitely a topic data engineers should be interested in.
  • From Infrastructure to Production: A Year of Self-Hosted LLMs : the biggest obstacle to open source in AI is the centralized access to large language and inference models. Open weights are a mitigation, not a solution. I love a good retrospective-style talk, so this should be fun.
  • Taming the LLM Zoo with Docker Model Runner: Inference with OCI Artifacts, llama.cpp, and vLLM : One of containerization’s greatest benefits to the development process is the way that standardizing for deployments ends up standardizing in general: Docker Model Runner seems like it could bring some rationality to LLM deployments.
  • All in RISC-V, RISC-V All in AI: Solving Real AI Compute Challenges with DeepComputing & Tenstorrent [Hackers voice] RISC architecture is gonna change everything!
• eBPF Devroom (all day, H.1308 Rolin): I hesitate to say much of the work at the container/Kubernetes level is “done”, but I don’t hesitate to say that much of the interesting work being done in the space relates to observability and eBPF is intrinsically tied to that. Good friendo Bill Mulligan is one of the people running this devroom and you should go support!
• Geospatial Devroom (all day, H.1301 Cornil):
  • A crowd-sourced open data site for memorial benches! : One of the best parts of FOSDEM is how anti-corporate it is. Talks like these would have difficulty attracting attention in other conferences, and I think this is an awesome talk. I always read the memorial on the bench when I sit down.
• Railways and Open Transport Devroom (15h-18h, K.3.601): Neurodivergence/autism aside, one of the coolest things happening in Europe that most Americans aren’t aware of in the world of open source is the giant push to move national services (government or otherwise) to open source software, and the rail industry is leading the way. I probably won’t have time to check out this Devroom and I’m mad about it.
• Legal & Policy Devroom (all day, UB5.230): In my humble-but-weird opinion, the Legal & Policy devroom is always one of the most interesting devrooms at FOSDEM if you like to get into the weeds about open source in general. It’s also one of the devrooms most likely to devolve into a spontaneous panel discussion, and that’s always fun.
  • Unique Challenges in Elected Governing Bodies for FOSS : Deb Bryant, Joe Brockemier et al. are absolutely the right crowd of people to tackle this topic. That said, they’re all marching slowly towards retirement, and it would be nice to bring new voices into the conversation.

January 31 - Fringe

• Linux Foundation Europe Reception (Brussels, BE, registration required, free): Event registration seems to be closed
• ClickHouse FOSDEM Community Dinner (Brussels, BE, registration required, free)

February 1 - Main conference

• Main track: Strategy for Trusting your Employer in Open Source: a Historical Approach (Janson): something I harp upon in the right environment (drink in hand, trusted audience, or on stage if the timing is right) is that open source communities need to be mindful of corporate money flowing into those communities. I have many thoughts and feelings about my time at the Linux Foundation. Resultingly, this is a talk I have personal interest in.
• High Performance Computing, Big Dat and Data Science (all day, H.1308 Rolin): this is the big one on Sunday for data engineers.
  • Accelerating complex Bioinformatics AI pipelines with Kubernetes : one of my favorite talks last year was a keynote by the Science Communicator at the European Space Agency where she discussed using large inference models to process petabytes of data from the ESA’s latest satellite. No human could do that level of computation, but all of humanity will benefit. This talk gives me the same vibes. AI is a complicated thing. It does have its uses. I hope we can cure cancer.
• Open Source and EU Policy Devroom (all day, UA2.118 Henriot): This is the other devroom most likely to devolve into a spontaneous panel, and thus good popcorn.jpg.
  • Could Compliance Costs Sustain FOSS? A Theory of Voluntary Attestations : Aeva is one of the smartest people I know working in the space of open source policy and how it intersects with open source hacking and communities. This talk is a must-watch for me, and be sure to catch the panel after it too!

February 1 - Fringe

• I have nothing on my schedule Fringe-wise, but if there’s something you think is interesting, feel free to leave a comment on LinkedIn or BlueSky (or wherever else I end up advertising this post) and I’ll happily update it.

post-FOSDEM

February 2

• 🌟 Snowflake OSS Meetup (London, UK, registration required, free): Featuring talks from maintainers of Apache Spark, Apache Iceberg and WarehousePG! I’m organizing this, so I should hope I’d be attending.. :)
• OTel Unplugged (Brussels, BE, registration required, free): The OpenTelemetry community is great and I wish I could be there!
• AI Plumbers (un)conference (Brussels, BE, registration required, free)
• Design and Documentation Clinic for FOSS Projects (Brussels, BE, registration required, free): Seems like a great event put on by the Ubuntu community about two of my passion topics/former careers. Probably a great place for an open source maintainer to meet designers and documentarians, too!
• Open Source Analytics Community presents Open Lakehouse and AI : Another one of my favorites, Josh Lee, is running this one. Altinity is doing great work with project Antalya and this should be a fun night.
• Config Management Camp (Ghent, BE, registration required, free 3 day event until February 4) : Config Management Camp always brings the heat with real-life stories of complex engineering gone sideways at scale.

February 3

• 🌟 Snowflake BUILD London (London, UK, registration required, free): Not strictly an open source event, but if your path bends towards London after FOSDEM we have talks on Apache Iceberg, pg_lake, Postgres, and more, so come say hi! :D