EESSI at FOSDEM'26¶
This year's FOSDEM exceeded all expectations a first-time attendee like me could have. Filled with interesting talks, wide range of diverse people and impactful projects, I bring back home a bag full of stickers, lovely memories and some Belgian chocolates.
Pre-FOSDEM hackathon (Thu + Fri)¶
Members of the EasyBuild + EESSI community gathered the Thursday and Friday right before the FOSDEM to do an informal hackathon to do hands-on work on both projects.
EESSI CLI tool¶
One of the main outcomes of this meet is the brainstorming and consequently the first releases of the EESSI CLI tool, a command-line tool to make the interaction with EESSI even easier!
It is still a work-in-progress, but it already features options like eessi shell to start an EESSI shell with your version of choice,
and eessi check to verify your CernVM-FS setup for accessing EESSI.
Here's a quick demo:
To start playing with the eessi tool yourself, install it with:
Food¶
After all the pair-programming and hard work we went to Le Corbeau, a 150-year old Belgian brewery where we could try local traditional dishes like the Flemish carbonnades. 
FOSDEM'26 (Sat+Sun)¶
CernVM-FS talk¶
EESSI was briefly featured as an example repository in the "Multi-Petabyte Data Distribution in Industry & Science with CernVM File System" talk.
For more information, including slides & recordings, see the talk page.
Group dinner¶
All speakers, volunteers and peers of the HPC, Big Data & Data Science devroom enjoyed a dinner fully sponsored by the High Performance Software Foundation at an Italian restaurant close to the FOSDEM venue.
The starters consisted of Italian finger food, focaccia and cured meats. Followed by pizza and cacio e pepe for mains and a gigantic tiramisu as the cherry on top dessert, so it is safe to assume that nobody went hungry to sleep.
If you look closely, you may spot both a Spack developer and a Canadian in the picture above!
Thank you HPSF for sponsoring the HPC devroom dinner!
Sunday¶
On Sunday, EESSI was featured in not just one, but two devrooms talks.
EESSI talk in Software Performance devroom¶
First one, by Kenneth Hoste in the Software Performance devroom titled "Keeping the P in HPC: the EESSI Way".
Here's the recording of the talk:
Slides are available here.
HPC devroom¶
The HPC, Big Data & Data Science devroom was filled with people!
Cookies¶
Accepting some cookies (literally) to have energy for the afternoon!
EESSI talk in HPC devroom¶
The second talk was given by Helena Vela at the HPC, Big Data & Data Science devroom, titled "Status update on EESSI, the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations", highlighting the developments made in EESSI during the last years.
Here's the recording of the talk:
Further details and slides are available in the talk page.
Off-topic funny things¶
How To Make Package Managers Scream¶
Kenneth's talk in the Main Track titled "How To Make Package Managers Scream" 
is a must-watch!
Check out the recording here:
Word cloud¶
Our first ever word cloud of the available software in EESSI reveals that EasyBuild is the package we have the most versions of
