FOSDEM

This weekend, FOSDEM is taking place in Brussels. Unlike most conferences, it stands out for the sheer breadth of its topics: from geospatial technologies to a panel discussion on what browsers might look like in 2026, from concurrency and testing in Go to talks on why you might not need an ORM at all — and much more.

For me, one of the main challenges is coming up with a useful way to select the most interesting talks without missing too much.

Since FOSDEM provides an XML feed (https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/xml) with all the events and speaker bios, I thought it would be interesting to let Claude build a nice site on top of that.

After about 50 prompts — and mostly steering things in the direction of UX — I think the result isn’t bad at all. Check it out at https://fosdem.hello-data.nl.

It even implemented an important feature to put overlapping events in the ‘My Events’ next to each other so you visually know that you cant go to both events since they overlap.

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Choose boring technology

When choosing your stack, it’s wise to rely on stable and proven technologies. For this website, that means:

• Node.js + Express

• Handlebars

• Bulma CSS

You could argue whether Bulma truly belongs in the “stable and proven” category, but the first two certainly do. These choices won’t impress many people in 2025 — and that’s perfectly fine. The goal isn’t to chase trends, but to make it easy to build a solid product.

But what does “solid” actually mean?

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Store and serve

As we read in the previous article, PostgreSQL is my database of choice. That isn’t just because I prefer Postgres over alternatives like MySQL, but because I once read an article titled “A Poor Man’s API”

That title stuck with me. To me, it captured the idea of an affordable, no-frills solution: using the database itself as a solid foundation for serving data, without all the extra layers and complexity that often come with a traditional backend.

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In the beginning

Long ago, I stumbled upon an application called Joplin. This was at a time when note-taking was becoming more and more popular. Obsidian was already a popular tool, but I was more charmed by Joplin: it felt simpler, it’s open source, and you can run your own Joplin Server for syncing.

And then I discovered the Joplin web clipper, which made it even more useful. It allowed me to easily store things like web links as notes in Joplin. For example, if I found something interesting on Hacker News but didn’t have time to read it right away, I could store the link in Joplin using the Web Clipper and come back to it later.

But now i have all these links stored as notes in Joplin, i can always open them with the Joplin client app but what if i want to share my notes with the rest of the world.

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