Sabbatical Diary: Week 18

· 3 min read · February 07, 2026 · #academic #cambridge #sabbatical

So. That was a rather stop-start week.

It started off pretty well: as noted last week, I was in Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2026 for the first time in a decade. As well as getting my tax return submitted to HMRC before the deadline on the Saturday, I also managed to finish my slides—more precisely, editing Amjad’s slides—to give my talk on Sunday literally hours¹ beforehand.

I found as others have commented it was very busy, and the venue quality was a bit patchy: some rooms seemed to work really well, some were rather hot with lots of background noise. It was great to catch up with a few folk though, as well as to give Amjad’s talk, “Unlocking extra cluster capacity with enhanced Linux cgroup scheduling”. Got a couple of good questions, plus a couple more follow-up chats off-mic. All-in-all I was pretty pleased with the attendance given it was the graveyard shift as the last talk in the Kernel devroom before the closing conference keynote in another building. For those who want more than the video, find the slides here.

I even managed to make it to the station on time notwithstanding having to bail off the tram and walk a bit to the metro due to police cars blocking the way, and then putting up with the usual rather stringent approach Brussels Eurostar seems to take to gate closing times.² So that was nice.

Unfortunately most of the rest of the week after I got back was taken up with a meeting for some external work I do (fun!) followed by a stomach bug for ~36 hours (not fun!). And then recovery, both physical and catching up on the resulting backlog.

Ho hum. Hopefully next week will be better! Or at least less… runny.

At least one. Maybe as much as two.

Seriously. Why does Brussels seem to be so much more rigid about this. I never have a problem at stations in London, Paris, Amsterdam. But for some reason, Brussels seems to close the gate absolutely on the dot of 30min before the train, no matter what. In this case I arrived to an almost empty hall—about three other people going through security ahead of me—to “are you for the 18.52?” “yes” “you have one minute before the gate closes”.