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 worldโs largest open-source conferences. This is that story.
โWe reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.โ โ David D. Clark
The Dream
When I was a young hackerโyeah, believe it or notโmy dream was to find other hackers in real life and just hang out together. Thatโs 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 โWindowsโ 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 fictionโlike telling my block friends about Dragon Ball Z spoilers Iโd 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 groupโfewer than ten of us in a city of thousandsโand 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. FOSDEMโthe Free and Open Source Software Developersโ European Meetingโis 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 hereโs the thing: Iโm more financially stable now, Iโve traveled to Europe for both leisure and work, and I speak comfortable (but still heavily accented) English. Iโve made peace with my accentโitโs part of the package, take it or leave it.
So, why not? The real surprise was that I hadnโt applied before.
The Logistics of Madness
When my proposed talk was accepted, my first reaction wasnโt joyโit 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 โ Mexico City โ London โ Brussels. With a seven-year-old. And a monthโs worth of luggage packed for both the scorching Mexican beach and a freezing European winterโflip-flops sharing suitcase space with thermal jackets, sunscreen next to wool scarves. And sanity (debatable).
After my wifeโbless her patienceโsaid โjust go for it,โ 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 pillowโa bear-shaped one my kid had shamelessly stolen from his grandma. Rest in peace, little bear pillow. You survived a Mexican grandmotherโs 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 Universitรฉ libre de Bruxelles. Iโll be honestโthereโs still a noticeable lack of diversity, especially in gender representationโbut 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 storeโexcept I literally had a kid with me in this candy store. Mozilla, Thunderbird, Letโs Encrypt, SUSE, and of course Mastodon, to name a few. I couldnโt 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 theyโre 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 hadnโt seen in over a decade was thereโwith his kid. Heโs 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 childrenโs chaos edition.
The Talk
When the time came for my talk, I walked in, set up, and delivered something far from perfectโbut unmistakably mine. I stumbled on a couple of words, my accent was thick, and Iโm sure I made at least one joke that only landed for me. But thatโs the style. Thatโs 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 noโonly 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, itโs not spending more time in other talks. Itโs not that I didnโt tryโI didโbut balancing a seven-year-oldโs 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 thatโs the thing about FOSDEM: itโs not a one-time event. Iโll be back. And next time, I want to do more than speakโI 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
Hereโs what got me, though. The part I didnโt expect.
My kid watched me speak at FOSDEM. He didnโt fully understand the contentโheโs seven, and ActivityPub isnโt exactly bedtime story materialโbut 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 didnโt. Later, visibly upset about his missed opportunity, he told me what he wanted to ask: โDo you play Minecraft?โ In front of an auditorium full of open-source developers discussing federation protocols, my kidโs burning question was about Minecraft. I love this human being more than I can express.

He asked questions the entire trip back: โWhat does SUSE do?โ โWill you talk at another one?โ โCan I have my own desk computer?โ
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 rightโPostgreSQL could use your donations, folks. That elephant has seen better days.

And the trip back was no less insane than the trip there. Brussels โ Iceland โ Seattle. Because apparently, when youโre already doing something absurd, you might as well add a layover near the Arctic Circle. We landed in Reykjavรญk 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 didnโt 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 (Iโm not going to pretend I didnโt need a moment after hearing that).
I thought about my own childhood. About the kid who couldnโt find a single hacker in his town. About the dusty streets and half-built houses. About how representation works in mysterious waysโhow seeing someone like you doing something impossible makes it feel possible. My son doesnโt know what itโs like to not see a path. For him, this is just what dad does. And maybe thatโs 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 wasnโt straight. It was messy, full of detours, broken English, lost pillows, and more coffee than any doctor would recommend. But every stepโevery hackerspace meetup with eight people, every local conference talk, every late night wrestling with codeโwas 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 wasnโt small to me. For the kid who couldnโt find a single hacker in his hometown, standing in front of that room was enormous.
FOSDEM wasnโt 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
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