FOSDEM 2022 Lightning Talk

On Sunday, I presented a lightning talk at the FOSDEM 2022 conference. Usually, FOSDEM takes place in Brussels, but recently it’s moved online. That was fortunate for me, because otherwise I probably would never have submitted a talk proposal!

The talk was about aretext, the vim clone I’ve been working on for the last couple years:

• Pre-recorded talk: it’s just under 12 minutes long, and it doesn’t include the live Q&A session.
• Abstract on fosdem.org, which will eventually link to the full video with Q&A.

Some thoughts on the experience:

• Recording myself talking was much more difficult than I expected! Even though this was a short video, it took a long time to create because I needed to learn how to use a microphone, recording software (OBS), and editing software (Kdenlive). I also had only a few hours to record the video while my wife took our daughter to ballet class.

• If you look carefully in the background of the video, you can see my wife’s half-finished macramé moon looming in the background like the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. You will not see the shoes, laundry, mail, art projects, and general clutter that I shoved into the kitchen.

• The audience asked interesting questions about Language Server Protocol support, plugin security, and (of course) whether I had used emacs. Unfortunately, for some reason, the Q&A feed ended early, mid-sentence, but I didn’t realize that until afterwards. One person stayed in the chat room afterwards to talk about text editing data structures and algorithms.

• It’s amazing that the conference is run 100% by volunteers! I’m very grateful for all the work they did to keep things running smoothly.