Sebastian Bergmann

Last weekend saw the second installment of the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) in Sankt Augustin. The conference revolved around a rich schedule of talks, highlighting current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Moreover, Open Source projects took the opportunity to organize their own meetings or even their own lineup of events. Just like last year, the PHP usergroups of Dortmund and Cologne/Bonn organized the PHP @ FrOSCon subconference with two full days of presentations.

For me, Sankt Augustin is conveniently located near to my hometown of Siegburg and so FrOSCon started for me on Friday night with greeting Giuseppe, Markus, Roland, and Beat from MySQL in Sankt Augustin for dinner. After dinner we made a quick excursion to Siegburg for the annual town fair that took place here over the weekend.



On Saturday, the first conference day, I attended a couple of talks (that I, apart from Arne's and Carola's presentation on XUL, don't remember). In the evening I attended the keysigning party before we headed out to Siegburg for dinner and another stroll over the town fair.



On Sunday, the second day of the conference, Tobias Schlitt arrived in Sankt Augustin and together we took care of the server that runs phpunit.de. In the afternoon, I gave my presentation on PHPUnit which was well received.



In the evening, we headed out to Cologne for dinner at a Brazilian restaurant were we enjoyed rodizio. Afterwards we walked to the Dom, took some pictures, and had some ice cream for dessert.

The PHP Usergroup Köln/Bonn, which meets up every month, has been invited by O'Reilly Germany to their offices last night.

The meeting started at 7:00 pm with a meal followed by three presentations. Alexandra Follenius from O'Reilly Germany talked about the production of an O'Reilly book, I gave a short introduction to PHPUnit, and Manuel Kiessling presented his PHP-based Attention Streams system that he is developing together with Rael Dornfest for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005.

I would like to thank Alexandra, Ariane, Gerd, and everyone else from the O'Reilly Germany team for having us. It was a great evening!

Update: There is an article about the meeting over at the O'Reilly Germany website now.

Following Derick's example I am posting this list of venues that I will attend in the months to come:

• Linux/UNIX Usergroup Sankt Augustin in Bonn, Germany on February, 24th,
  
• Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium on February, 26th,
  
• PHP Usergroup Köln/Bonn in Köln, Germany on March, 4th,
  
• Linux/UNIX Usergroup Sankt Augustin in Bonn, Germany on March, 10th,
  
• CeBIT and the Heise CeBIT Party in Hannover, Germany on March, 11th,
  
• International PHP Conference 2005 - Spring Edition on May 3rd and 4th in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
  

Although the PHP Usergroup Köln/Bonn meets up every month I am mentioning its March meeting specifically above because that meeting is special. We (the usergroup) have been invited by O'Reilly Germany to their offices where we will have a couple of sessions (I will present PHPUnit, for instance) over a bowl of soup.

I will also be at LinuxTag in June in Karlsruhe, Germany and maybe at the GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) in May in Stuttgart, Germany.