FOSDEM 2025 report

FOSDEM 2025 came and went, and it was a blast.

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers in Brussels. It’s the largest conference for open-source software It was the first time I attended, and I’m really glad I did. Not only did I have a chance to present a topic I was interested in, but I got to see just how the world of software and open source is evolving.

FOSDEM is a busy conference. The 2025 edition featured 1193 speakers, 1104 events, and 79 tracks spread across two days. I spent my time in the Tool the Docs track, the Open Source Design track, around project stands, and seeing a few miscellaneous things here and there.

Tool the Docs

The Tool the Docs track is, and was, all about free and open-source tools for working with documentation. Here are the presentations:

• Org mode witchcraft showed the magic of using Emacs for working with documentation. Emacs is a powerful text editor, and I feel I should pick it up again some day.
• CLI Magic Tricks for Docs Projects was more of a primer on using the command line when working with documentation projects. We got to see some tools which are common on the command line, if you’re already familiar with it, such as grep. And that’s the thing: not everyone is familiar with the command line, so it’s good to have someone present it.
• I saw a talk about patterns for maintainer and tech writer collaboration. Collaboration is a big deal. Different teams don’t always work well together.
• AsciiDoc is evolving into a formal specification, which is exciting. I’m not sure whether it will significantly help its adoption, but we can hope.
• I got to see a talk about Abstract Syntax Trees, or ASTs. Really dynamic and exciting, and not just because we got to see a video of vehicles crashing in the Montreal snow.
• API documentation testing with AI user simulation? Yes please! That sounds like an exciting use of AI to me. Naive interactions with APIs is a good use case.
• I missed the last talk about interactive learning environments. I had to step out.

And in the middle of these talks, Jake Cahill (from Redpanda) and I gave the talk No more broken docs: keep docs accurate with Doc Detective. We got to present Doc Detective, a tool that lets you write tests for your documentation content. I’m excited to try and implement it in projects I work on, and maybe at work?

Open Source Design

I didn’t get to see all of the talks about open source and design, but the ones I did see cemented something I’ve heard and felt for a long time: design is hard. It’s amazing we get the results we do!

Did you know that Open Source Design is an organization that helps connect designers with open-source software? I didn’t! They came to MC the talks as well, from which we got to learn about:

• Ecosystem mapping and user research
• How Thunderbird has evolved its design
• CLI design, and what you should think about (and a lot of people don’t)
• The importance of accessibility
• Bridging the divide between creative teams and engineering teams
• A real-world example of how one project improved its accessibility

In a way, the design talks stayed with me longer than the ones about documentation. I get to thank the very first talk about ecosystem mapping and user research.

Ecosystem mapping and user research touch everything. If you research how your product is used, and what it connects to, you can make more informed decisions about any aspect of your project. You can write better documentation. You can design a better user interface. You can change the product internals. Design is anything and everything.

Project stands

A lot of projects, organizations and companies exhibit at FOSDEM. You can talk a walk through many university buildings, speak with representatives, and collect the hundreds of different stickers available at the booths. Seriously, there were so many stickers.

In no particular order, some of my favorites:

• Open source at CERN
• Grafana (I finally got to understand them better)
• DeepComputing’s RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop
• Digital Public Goods
• Mastodon
• Ubuntu
• Debian
• Fedora project
• LibreOffice
• Mozilla (and its neighbor Thunderbird)
• KDE
• CalyxOS
• Software Freedom Conservancy
• VideoLan (yes, they had the cone hats)
• Let’s Encrypt
• Jenkins (with all the cool sticker designs)
• GitLab
• Codeberg
• Pine64

The Digital Public Goods Alliance stand was pretty cool. Think of an organization that acts as an umbrella for various open-source software, certifies its quality, and advocates for its use in different markets. That’s DPG. They are how you get enterprise-grade open-source financial software in African countries that may not have the infrastructure yet. They are how India gets sustainable renewable energy in places that don’t have electricity yet. It’s great that this organization exists.

I have a soft spot for the KDE stand, and not just because I use it. I got to learn about how hard it was for the project to find people to help with documentation, to the point they had to hire someone to work on it for them. It’s true: few people really want to write documentation. I say that as a technical writer.

The rest

I’m leaving out other interactions, fringe events, socials (thanks documentarians!), and time spent exploring Brussels. There was plenty to do. I left with plenty of ideas for future projects, and one for a possible talk later.

I’ll have to go again next year.