My FOSSASIA 2026 Experience

Ay, another post! And this time it’s not way too late! As of writing this post, FOSSASIA 2026 just ended a day ago, and I’ve got quite an experience to share. I’ll be mentioning some names of people I met, so if you see your name here and would like things changed (removal, correction, social link, etc.), please let me know! I also have a tendency to forget names, so if I forgot to mention you, please let me know as well!

Community Day

The first day is less of a main event, though still awesome to participate in. I even met some people from KDE Network Thailand and the Thai Linux User Community! Well, since it’s not quite the main event yet, I didn’t quite meet all of them (only met some out of a bunch - Mr. Vee, Mr. Chaiwat, and some others). Too bad I didn’t get a picture on the first day, though.

Here are some of the pictures I did manage to get on the first day:

A FOSSASIA 2026 banner A picture of one of the talks

Main Event - First Day

And here’s the main event! This is also where I met most of the people from the two communities I mentioned above, plus some more people from the TechTransThai community!

A picture from the opening ceremony Parody of movie posters at the VLC booth The Grand Hall at True Digital Park One of the talks

This is the most memorable one: a little robot with a VLC cone hat on top, “running” around the Grand Hall. What a quirky little guy!

A remote-controlled robot with the VLC cone hat on top The people controlling the robot

Various pieces of assistive technology

Main Event - Second Day

Last day of the event! I managed to snap some more pictures of the talks, and also got to meet even more people! This is also the day I got introduced to someone who has contributed to GNOME Thai localization in the past, and got to learn some juicy lore about the previous coordinator of the GNOME Thai localization team that, as it turns out, I was already following on Mastodon! Too bad Mr. Thep didn’t join us, though we all talked good about him.

A selfie of me and the people at the GNOME booth, with me being slightly out of frame and looking too high up because of my horrid selfie skills A sticker of the old Debian logo A presentation on Typhoon AI A presentation on Fedora Badges

Fun fact, when the presentation in the last picture ended and the presenter asked if there were any questions, one of the attendees asked:

If you are a Red Hat engineer, why are you wearing a grey hat?

I’ll probably forever quote this question, not gonna lie.

Retrospective and Conclusion

Well, that was quite an event! I never realized how tight-knit of a community I was in until I attended this event and met them in person. I’m very glad to have joined the community and met all these people, and I hope to continue being a part of it. I’ll really have to remind myself to not forget to bring my laptop next time for the workshops, though.

Thanks for reading this rambling of mine! And again, if you’ve met me at the event and would like to be mentioned or redacted in this post, please let me know! If you’re new here, maybe we can meet at the next FOSSASIA event in 2027? Anyway, that’s the end of the post, so see you in the next one!