FOSDEM N00b Tips
So this year (2025) was my first year to visit FOSDEM. It was also my first time in Belgium. I started writing down these tips as I learned them. If you are more experienced and you want to correct anything here, please do let me know.
Preparing for FOSDEM
- If you’re an Android person, install FOSDEM Companion[1] and start bookmarking tracks you’re interested in. That will come in handy on FOSDEM day, trust me.
- If you can, pack your own lunch and bring it with you to the conference. The food trucks are ok, but expect to pay 10 EUR for lunch, and the lines get really long around lunchtime.
- Bring a water bottle and snack while you’re at it.
- You can pay for pretty much everything you need by card when you get to Brussels, if you don’t want to carry much cash. Even the food trucks at FOSDEM accept cards.
- FOSDEM is a conference with a lot of people packed into small spaces. Bring a face mask and hand sanitizer. As they said during the opening talk, “FOSDEM Flu is real.”
Getting to the conference
- FOSDEM has a page with instructions to get to the conference, and it’s really good high-level information. For the 2025 conference it was here.
- If you’re coming from the airport, there are kiosks where you can buy train tickets[2]. A ticket to the central train station (Bruxelles Centraal) cost me about 11 EUR.
- The busses to the university are packed with FOSDEM attendees. If you get hot or claustrophobic, take off your coat before you get on the bus. It gets warm and cozy.
- The easiest way to pay the bus fare is to swipe a bank card on the contactless payment doodad thingy. You don’t even need to talk to the bus driver or push any buttons. Just swipe your card.[3]
At the conference
- If you see a ridiculously long line when you arrive at the university first thing in the morning, it’s not for registration.[4] Instead, it’s probably a line for buying t-shirts and hoodies. They are apparently very high-demand, especially in the morning because they will run out of certain sizes later. So I do recommend standing in that line… if buying some swag is important to you.
- The lines for coffee in the morning are long. If you can bring your own, do it. Or alternatively use the long lines as an opportunity to get into conversations with other fellow nerds.
- Show up at rooms early. They often reach full capacity long before the talk starts.[5]
- If you’re interested in a talk that’s being given by a relatively famous person, you may need to get into the room for the preceeding talk before the one you’re actually interested in.[6]
Leaving Brussels
- If you’re flying out of Brussels, I saw one place to fill up a water bottle for free after you’ve been through security. It’s at gate A43, labelled “free water refills.” It’s in an area where there are other signs for overpriced airport food and beverages, so it’s easy to miss if you don’t know it’s there.
Other tips
I’m not the first person to produce content like this on the Internet. A quick search, for example, yielded this very good first-timer FOSDEM guide which has more useful information. I’m sure there are plenty of others.
Footnotes
FOSDEM recommends this app, and others, on their mobile schedule apps page. ↩︎
Public transport is a good way to get around, but there are things like taxis as well. I’ve never used those, but I bet they’re expensive. ↩︎
Concerningly, I don’t actually know how much I paid because it didn’t show me a price… ↩︎
FOSDEM doesn’t require you to register, check in, or anything like that. ↩︎
FOSDEM staff is really good and strict about room capacity. Some rooms allow people to stand or sit along the walls when all the seats fill up, but others have a strict max capacity that is enforced, and there will be staff at the door to prevent people from coming inside when that max capacity has filled up. ↩︎
For example, during FOSDEM 2025 most of the people in the Security room just stayed in their seats after one particular talk, which means only a handful of people in the hallway got in to hear Daniel Steinberg speak. ↩︎
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