Another year, another FOSDEM. I think my first one was 2014, but I’m not sure. I can conclude that just like myself, the hotel I usually stay at has started to be in a small need of renovation, and Brussels nowadays feels a tiny bit like another home. With that, let’s head into a summary of FOSDEM 2026.

The theme this year was policy, security and regulation. A lot of developers nowadays are very interested in these aspects, so much in fact that you had to line up early to have a chance of attending the crowded rooms. This is good — software engineering is far much more than about the code. The public was the general mix of youngsters, old gray beards, people from the EU departments, academia, companies, public sector, hobbyists. Although the high interest in policy, there were still talks that deep dived into more obscure topics, so I don’t feel FOSDEM is losing its grassroots spirit, even though the talks are evolving.
Were there 10,000 visitors? I can only guess.

NOTE: This post is written from a private developer perspective, not that of my employer.

I’ve started migrating my active projects from GitHub to Codeberg. Codeberg is a European open-source alternative that overall resembles GitHub—a code collaboration platform. I’d been considering it for a while, and now that it’s almost done, I wanted to share my thoughts.j

Why? One thing I’ve increasingly felt about GitHub is that they ignore basic, important developer features while prioritizing other unrequested ones. What I miss includes fast-forward merges for linear history, rebase-only repos, SHA256 support, and AsciiDoc rendering that’s still missing or broken. The whole markup rendering is a mess with uneven support for different formats. Full token security has been requested for a long time, yet we still have to use old, insecure Classic tokens for publishing packages (fine-grained tokens aren’t done). Many solutions end up 80% done and then seem to stall. Maybe it’s telling that the open source parts, like the GitHub markup repo, seem abandoned. There are issues sitting for years, and the commit history shows no steady stewardship. Overall it feels like GitHub has, in some areas, stopped prioritizing developer community needs and technical excellence. Much of GitHub is historically good too, of course, but I expect far more technical drive and listening to the developer community from such a widely used global service.

I recently started moving my maintained projects from GitHub to Codeberg.GitHub to Codeberg.

On the road, I collected a few notes on the problems I encountered feature wise.

This is in no way meant to complain on Forgejo (or Codeberg), but maybe it will help getting those remaining issues solved, and if so it fills a purpose. Also, please correct if I have missed something, and I’m wrong. For most of these the exists Issues though.

Commit messages matter. Yet many of us still toss out a “fix stuff” or “wip” when we’re moving fast. Maybe you let an AI agent vibe‑commit whatever it feels like. That’s totally fine in test branches, where you can clean them up later, but not in the main branch. The effort to write a good commit message is the same as writing a bad one. Although, the difference shows up six months later when you dig through the git logs and the messages don’t give a clear picture of what happened.

I’ve been translating free software on and off for years. It started with wanting to translate a project I used daily, and then it continued because it was interesting and fun. In this post I want to share a few thoughts about why translations are important, and what’s worth keeping in mind in this context.

Why Bother at all?

The simple answer is that good translations means more people can use tools in their own language. But it’s more than that.