For the past few years, an idea has been floating around to set up a dev room for Swift at FOSDEM (FOSDEM24 - Home), which is a major open source conference in Brussels, Belgium. You can see last year's schedule here: FOSDEM 2023 - Schedule
The goal for this dev room would be to showcase some of the work being done by the Swift community, so that we can reach a larger audience and hopefully attract new developers.
Since this would be a first time dev room, we will need to provide at least some draft of a schedule with the dev room request, in order for it to be accepted.
Ideal topics should cover tools, libraries, or projects that are open source and not exclusive to Apple platforms.
Talks average 30 mins, but shorter or longer talks are fine as well.
Talks can range from very introductory to highly technical.
Dev rooms are small (classroom size) and informal, so ideal for new speakers.
If you would be interesting in speaking, please leave a comment here, or get in touch!
Note that we're just gathering ideas at this time. If we feel confident that we can fill at least a half-day track, we can proceed with the request for a dev room. If and when that gets accepted, a call for papers will follow.
I could talk about the processing of XML with Swift, which is maybe not a âsexyâ topic but might be interesting because this is running at a large organization on Windows, Linux, and of course also on macOS.
as discussed with @stackotter on the Swift GTK Community Discord, we would be happy to bring the topic of Swift + GTK to the Dev Room with me as a speaker.
What would you need from us for the dev room request?
I don't have much (any) free time until end of this month, so I hope some basic summary would suffice.
Also, we can approach this from many different angles - introduction to GTK from Swift developer's perspective, introduction to current "state of the art" in Swift+GTK wrappers or more focused on "how to use" current Swift+GTK wrappers. This topic is "wide and deep."
On personal note. I plan to create an open source library of "LLDB scripts with a spin" so I might bring this topic to the Dev Room. Let me know.
@stuchlej For the dev room request, nothing is really required w.r.t. the schedule, but last time I enquired about possibly requesting a dev room for Swift, they did recommend to provide at least some outline of a schedule.
I assume they just want some assurance that we will be able to fill the time we have in the room, as they have a high demand for dev rooms, and don't want rooms to go unused.
For the last two years, I have built a platform for automotive diagnostics and maintenance in Swift. Certain components (ECU simulators) are running on Linux. While most of these components themselves are closed source, I could talk about my experiences, e.g.:
"Foundation on Linux. The good, the bad, the ugly."
I'd be happy to join as well, as a speaker or otherwise. I've also got three team members whom are super interested in joining such an event.
In addition to sharing success stories I've had implementing Swift as customers, there are also a couple cool technical topics that I could speak about:
Hi, this is such a great idea, and already a track of topics that all sound super interesting! Assuming I can work out accommodation, etc. I'd be happy to talk about Swift for Arduino. It's been many years since the last time I did an in person talk on the subject!
Happy to contribute as well (Fosdem is in my back garden or close :-) I can help either to organise the track (create a CFP, review proposals) and / or propose a talk as well. I am working a lot of Generative AI and LLM, and how they can be used from Swift or useful for Swift developers.
That sounds all pretty interesting. I guess we could easily create a solid set of talks and/or workshops, if we get the devroom. I'm a tad bit worried about the COVID19 situation this winter, but let's cross fingers.
Sounds like a great idea. I can either give a talk specifically about using swift 5.9 for Arduino and the Hardware Abstraction Layer we're implementing.
Or I can do a workshop for beginners, where people can 'bring their own boards'.
This is a really awesome initiative, thanks @svanimpe ! It'd be awesome to get together a full track -- I tried sharing info about this thread on social media, and other folks can as well
@svanimpe, I'm super excited by the interest on this thread, and thank you so much for kicking it off. I'd be thrilled for you to submit an application to FOSDEM on behalf of the Swift project based on the interest for participation voiced on this thread.
This is unfortunate. Maybe they regard Swift more as an Apple thing and not as an open source project? But would Kotlin and Go be without JetBrains and Google? But one should not speculate too much and shouldn't assume anything bad, maybe they just have enough rooms for the âoldâ topics⌠Letâs try this next year or at another place
I can only advise you to try next year again. Ages ago (about 2005 to 2012) GNUstep was present at FOSDEM, sometimes we got our own dev room, other years we had only a booth. Since I was somewhat involved with organizing it around this time, I can tell you that it is not that easy to get a dev room at FOSDEM, even when you had one in the year before, even when you're considered an "official GNU project" like GNUstep is. So don't give up too quickly!
