Brussels / 1 & 2 February 2020

schedule

Friday Beer Event

While coming over to Brussels to attend FOSDEM, don’t miss this great opportunity to taste some of the finest beer in Belgium (and hence in the world).

When?

Friday, 31 January 2020 from 16h00 onwards, but feel free to join the party at any time of the evening.

We will be there until the bar closes (well after midnight).

Beer, Beer and some more Beer

The Beer Event will again take place at the Delirium Café, in a beautiful alley near the Grand Place in Brussels.

For efficiency reasons, the number of different beers is limited.

For this edition, these beers have been selected and await your judgement:

Virtual Beer Distribution Algorithm v3.3.99.beta

After about twenty years of incremental improvements to our notorious Beer Distribution Algorithm, we appear to have almost reached a stable version with the algorithm used: v3.3.99.beta We have some small changes to the algorithm to announce this year.

Security measures / access control

We have reserved the ground floor of the bar (Delirium Café) as a private party for FOSDEM, and this between 18h00 and 1h00. You are welcome to join as of 16h00, as well as stay after 1h00. FOSDEM volunteers will help us keep this area FOSDEM-only. If you meet a volunteer or a guard at the entrance to the bar or at the entrace to the alley, make it clear that you are there for the FOSDEM party. Wearing appropriately geeky attire tends to do the trick, as does demonstrating your initiation into geekdom has been successful (vim forever!). i If your attempt fails, you'll get a second chance: your answers to some very tricky questions will determine how you'll spend your Friday evening.

Beer Tokens

Tokens pricing starts at €5.00 for one token, and decreases to €3.60 if bought in sufficient quantities. One token, one glass (25cl) of draught beer (draft for our intercontinental visitors). For the sake of simplicity, soda (cola, lemonade, water, etc) is beer too—at least as far as tokens are concerned. Tokens may be bought individually or in bigger quantities, but FOSDEM staff prefers to deal with bigger quantities and paper money rather than metal money. It’s lighter, easier to sort and recycles perfectly. No electronic payments are supported, please ensure you have cash money (in euros) if you plan to quench that thirst! Tokens will be sold as of 18h00 (at the same time when our reserved space becomes exclusive for FOSDEM visitors). FOSDEM tokens are also accepted at the Hoppy Loft (first floor), the Floris Bar—consisting of the Tequileria, the Garden and the Monasterium— (across the alley from the Delirium Café) as well as at the bar in the basement (Taphouse).

When you arrive at the bar, find the token selling booth (look for arrows, as well as a gaggle of geeks in flashy yellow and orange t-shirts). In exchange for cash money, you will receive “beer tokens”.

We know you'd like to be able to use your bank card for payments. Unfortunately we can not comply with that request. Mobile connectivity is a tricky thing, given the location and the amount of radiation a crowd will absorb. As such, we require euro bills and/or coins. We advise you acquire the appropriate amounts of cash beforehand. We can point out the following ATM's in the neighbourhood:

Quality of Service

To keep latencies low and throughput high, we need everyone’s help. The easiest way to keep things going smoothly is for everyone to work together and implement a properly coded transmit and receive window, as well as implement multiplexing and virtualisation. Send out one person at a time to acquire resources for your group. There's no reason why each member of your group should go and get tokens. It's a double win: less people in the queue, and more tokens for the same amount (1 token costs more per token than 10). Do not order individual beers—order beers for people around you too! Trays will be made available to efficiently move more than one beer from the bar to where they are needed. Similarly, when ordering beer, please take a moment to collect any empty glasses around you on a tray and send them back to the bar with whoever is ordering beer.

The Delirium Café staff is working hard to make our evening as pleasant as possible, but we’re legion.

Laws of Physics

Sadly, even the FOSDEM Beer Event is subject to the fundamental laws of physics. Our request for an exception for the principle that no two solid objects can occupy the same space at the same time resulted in an RSET. If you find the bar getting too crowded, it might help to go for dinner and come back later. Some of the bars will be open until 06:00 (that’s 6am to intercontinental geeks). While FOSDEM staff will stop distributing tokens a couple of hours before closure (we have a conference to set up early in the morning), the tokens will be valid all night and after tokens run out, beer can be exchanged directly for cash too. From past experience the bar service has a very high packet loss—as well as a high number of collisions and retries—between 22:30 and 00:45.

A note of caution

Unlike some other beers, Belgian beer is not just coloured water. Some beers contain significant quantities of alcohol and will give you a pounding hangover (as a side note, consuming lots of (pure) water helps preventing that, and Club Mate can get you back into shape the next day, the bar at FOSDEM has this nectar available on Saturday and Sunday). FOSDEM staff is not responsible for any hallucinations you may experience as a result of this event. :-)

Be there!

A lot of work has gone into making this beer event the best ever. We’ve taken into account the suggestions from previous years and are confident that this edition will be a blast. Bring your friends and join us for a great evening out as well as a great opportunity to socialise with fellow contributors from all around the world.

Location

map to the Beer Event venue

Footnote

FOSDEM is always looking for volunteers, even for the Beer Event. If you want to apply, contact Jan Gyselinck (take the first letter of the given name, the full surname (at) fosdem.org and you'll have the email address).