FOSDEM 2026: The Kid Who Dreamed of Hackers Found Them in Brussels
Summary: A kid from a small Mexican town dreamed of finding real-life hackers. Two decades later, he flew his family to Brussels and spoke at one of the world’s largest open-source conferences. This is that story.
“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.” – David D. Clark
The Dream
When I was a young hacker—yeah, believe it or not—my dream was to find other hackers in real life and just hang out together. That’s it. That was the whole dream.
It sounds modest now, but you have to understand the context. I come from a very small town in Mexico, the kind of place where internet was a luxury, Linux was a word nobody recognized, and “Windows” was mostly what you opened to let the heat out. The idea of attending a tech conference was absurd. Attending one in English? In another country? That was pure science fiction—like telling my block friends about Dragon Ball Z spoilers I’d read online, except even less believable.
But with time, and a painfully slow DSL connection, I found my people. I stumbled into the local Linux user group—fewer than ten of us in a city of thousands—and we built something from nothing. A hackerspace. Community events. Workshops with maybe a dozen attendees if we were lucky. Eventually, I found my way to national conferences and even talked at a few of them. Each one felt like a small victory, a tiny crack in the wall between where I was and where I wanted to be.
The Shot
So when the opportunity to submit a talk to FOSDEM 2026 appeared, I just shot my shot.
I did it almost by instinct, without overthinking it. FOSDEM—the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting—is one of the largest open-source conferences in the world. Thousands of developers, hundreds of talks, legendary project booths. It had always been a place that existed on the other side of a dream for me. But here’s the thing: I’m more financially stable now, I’ve traveled to Europe for both leisure and work, and I speak comfortable (but still heavily accented) English. I’ve made peace with my accent—it’s part of the package, take it or leave it.
So, why not? The real surprise was that I hadn’t applied before.
The Logistics of Madness
When my proposed talk was accepted, my first reaction wasn’t joy—it was panic. The kind of panic you feel when you push to main and then read the diff. The real problem was logistics.
I already had a trip to Mexico planned for personal reasons. Going to FOSDEM meant extending the family travel by a week, rerouting flights, and solving the kind of logistical puzzle that makes your brain hurt. Tepic, a small city in the mountains of western Mexico → Mexico City → London → Brussels. With a seven-year-old. And a month’s worth of luggage packed for both the scorching Mexican beach and a freezing European winter—flip-flops sharing suitcase space with thermal jackets, sunscreen next to wool scarves. And sanity (debatable).
After my wife—bless her patience—said “just go for it,” and after numerous conversations with both AI and non-AI advisors about how to make it less stressful, we committed. At the end of January, I found myself at the tiny airport of Tepic, eating the most amazing torta de pierna, beginning an absurd journey to Belgium.
We crossed through London, hopped on the Eurostar to Brussels, and somewhere between countries, we lost a pillow—a bear-shaped one my kid had shamelessly stolen from his grandma. Rest in peace, little bear pillow. You survived a Mexican grandmother’s house only to perish somewhere in the English Channel.
The Candy Store
And then, there I was. At FOSDEM. With my kid. In Brussels.
The place was electric. People from every imaginable background wandered through the halls of the Université libre de Bruxelles. I’ll be honest—there’s still a noticeable lack of diversity, especially in gender representation—but the energy was undeniable. It felt like a living, breathing monument to what open source can be.
Seeing the project booths was like being a kid in a candy store—except I literally had a kid with me in this candy store. Mozilla, Thunderbird, Let’s Encrypt, SUSE, and of course Mastodon, to name a few. I couldn’t help myself; I told my son that when I was young, one of my first dreams was to work for SUSE. He listened carefully, the way seven-year-olds do when they’re filing away information for later use (probably to embarrass me at dinner).
Keeping a seven-year-old entertained at a developer conference is its own extreme sport. Thankfully, a friend I hadn’t seen in over a decade was there—with his kid. He’s a no-gringo, a Dutchman who happens to have worked at Innox in Mexico. Our kids hit it off, and suddenly the conference had a parallel track: unsupervised children’s chaos edition.
The Talk
When the time came for my talk, I walked in, set up, and delivered something far from perfect—but unmistakably mine. I stumbled on a couple of words, my accent was thick, and I’m sure I made at least one joke that only landed for me. But that’s the style. That’s always been the style.
Just before stepping up, Elena handed me the most fabulous FOSDEM sweater in existence. People noticed. People asked where to get one. But no—only I could have it. Exclusive distribution, zero units available. (Okay fine, I was just lucky, but let me have this moment.)
If I have one regret, it’s not spending more time in other talks. It’s not that I didn’t try—I did—but balancing a seven-year-old’s attention span with a conference schedule is a negotiation no diplomacy course prepares you for. I caught fragments, glimpses, enough to know I was missing incredible stuff. But that’s the thing about FOSDEM: it’s not a one-time event. I’ll be back. And next time, I want to do more than speak—I want to listen, linger, and actually have those hallway conversations that everyone says are the best part of any conference.
The Kid and the Dream
Here’s what got me, though. The part I didn’t expect.
My kid watched me speak at FOSDEM. He didn’t fully understand the content—he’s seven, and ActivityPub isn’t exactly bedtime story material—but he saw his dad on a stage, in front of a room full of people, in another continent, talking about something he built. When the Q&A started, he wanted to raise his hand. He got shy, though, and didn’t. Later, visibly upset about his missed opportunity, he told me what he wanted to ask: “Do you play Minecraft?” In front of an auditorium full of open-source developers discussing federation protocols, my kid’s burning question was about Minecraft. I love this human being more than I can express.
He asked questions the entire trip back: “What does SUSE do?” “Will you talk at another one?” “Can I have my own desk computer?”
He saw the booths, the projects, the people. He kept posing for photos with each open-source mascot like a tiny celebrity on a press tour. His favorite was the PostgreSQL elephant, though we were genuinely concerned about its health. Based on the state of that costume, I think he might be right—PostgreSQL could use your donations, folks. That elephant has seen better days.
And the trip back was no less insane than the trip there. Brussels → Iceland → Seattle. Because apparently, when you’re already doing something absurd, you might as well add a layover near the Arctic Circle. We landed in Reykjavík with our beach-and-winter Frankenstein luggage, stepped outside into wind that felt personally offended by our existence, and my kid asked if the land was actually made of ice. Close enough, kid. Close enough.
A week later, during a conversation with his teacher, my son was asked about the most memorable thing from the trip. He didn’t say the beach in Mexico, or the train through Europe, or the wind in Iceland, or even the lost bear pillow. He said the most memorable thing was seeing his dad talk at a university. That it made him proud (I’m not going to pretend I didn’t need a moment after hearing that).
I thought about my own childhood. About the kid who couldn’t find a single hacker in his town. About the dusty streets and half-built houses. About how representation works in mysterious ways— how seeing someone like you doing something impossible makes it feel possible. My son doesn’t know what it’s like to not see a path. For him, this is just what dad does. And maybe that’s the whole point.
Full Circle
Twenty years ago, I was a teenager in a small Mexican town, writing code in paper notebooks and dreaming of a world I could barely imagine. Today, I stood in Brussels and spoke to a room full of open-source developers about a project I created.
The path from there to here wasn’t straight. It was messy, full of detours, broken English, lost pillows, and more coffee than any doctor would recommend. But every step—every hackerspace meetup with eight people, every local conference talk, every late night wrestling with code—was a brick in the road that led to that stage.
And yeah, I get it, talking for half an hour at a conference with hundreds of talks may seem like a small feat. One slot among many. But it wasn’t small to me. For the kid who couldn’t find a single hacker in his hometown, standing in front of that room was enormous.
FOSDEM wasn’t just a conference for me. It was proof that the kid from Tepic who dreamed of finding hackers in real life finally did. They were in Brussels all along, waiting for him to show up.
And he brought his kid.
Also readable in: https://maho.dev/2026/02/fosdem-2026-the-kid-who-dreamed-of-hackers-found-them-in-brussels/ by @mapache:
#fosdem #open-source #conferences #community #travel #personal-growth #europe #public-speaking
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