FISL has always been a special conference to me. I attended it for the first time about 9 years ago while I was still a grad student. And I continued to attend it until I moved abroad in 2006. It was a period when the Free Software movement was starting to take shape in Brazil and it was definitely one of the first conferences that gave me a clearer sense of what it means to be part of a community.

For this reason, I was thrilled to be invited to speak at FISL this year. I gave two talks—both in Portuguese. The first one was called Reflections on a Career in Open Source (video, 83.3MB, CC-BY-SA) and the second one was called Firefox for Android: Past, Present, and Future (video, 69.5MB, CC-BY-SA).

This was also a great opportunity to meet a lot of people from the Mozilla community in Brazil. Mozilla had a solid presence at the conference because of their hard work. Besides all the talks covering different Mozilla initiatives, there was a Firefox OS apps hackathon and a few SUMO sprints—both had pretty good attendance.

Attending FISL this year has been a rather nostalgic experience. Just crossing the main entrance brought up some vivid memories from my first FISLs. A lot has changed in the conference: new faces, new projects, larger audience, etc. But the atmosphere is still the same: thousands of people sharing their passion for software freedom.

I really hope I can attend FISL next year.