FOSDEM was a blast
and AtomVM literally made noise
Also this year I managed to attend FOSDEM in Brussels.
If you’ve never been: you show up with a plan, then the hallway track happens, and suddenly it’s Sunday evening and you spent most of the time talking in the hallway (no regrets).
No BEAM devroom, but…
Sadly, we didn’t get the “Erlang, Elixir, Gleam and Friends” devroom this year. FOSDEM gets a ton of devroom proposals, and rooms change every year.
But in true Erlang spirit we did it distributed: instead of one room for a half day, we had BEAM-related talks spread across different tracks and days. It ended up being 10 talks about the BEAM ecosystem and projects built on it.
If you missed them, keep an eye on the beam-fosdem schedule page here:
https://beam-fosdem.dev/schedule/
That page links to the individual FOSDEM event pages (and as video recordings get published, that’s usually where they show up).
AtomVM showed up in the Music Production devroom
Now the fun part: AtomVM didn’t just show up, it showed up in a place I absolutely didn’t expect: the Music Production devroom.
Asep Bagja Priandana gave a talk called “midiMESH: Network MIDI with Elixir on ESP32 via AtomVM”.
The project is a wireless MIDI controller built with Elixir, an ESP32-C3 microcontroller and AtomVM, using WiFi + UDP networking, and physical controls like knobs/faders.
When I first spotted an AtomVM talk in the Music Production schedule, my reaction was basically: wait… what? But as soon as Asep explained the “why”, it instantly made sense:
First, BEAM-style lightweight processes map beautifully to a bunch of inputs happening at once.
Second, message passing keeps the design clean when real-time-ish stuff starts piling up.
Third, Elixir is a friendly entry point if you’re coming from web/dev tooling, but you want to build physical things.
And that last point is honestly one of my favorite AtomVM stories: Elixir + AtomVM can help web developers become makers without having to throw away the stack they already enjoy.
If you want to dig in, the repo is on GitHub https://github.com/nanassound/midimesh_esp32, and the video will be available on the FOSDEM event page.
I also gave an AtomVM talk in /dev/random
I gave a short intro talk too: “AtomVM: Elixir, Erlang, and Gleam on Microcontrollers”, in the /dev/random devroom.
It’s aimed at folks who are curious about BEAM languages but haven’t used Erlang/Elixir/Gleam before, and also at embedded folks who are used to MicroPython/CircuitPython/Espruino and are wondering “okay, but why would I want supervision trees on a microcontroller?”
Video is available here: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/YP97YR-atomvm_elixir_erlang_and_gleam_on_microcontrollers/
The best part was the people
Like every year, I didn’t attend as many talks as I could have, because the hallway track happened, and it was worth it.
FOSDEM is one of those rare places where you can talk to someone about distributed systems, compilers, synths, weird networking edge cases and tiny microcontrollers… all in the span of 15 minutes, and nobody looks at you like you’re speaking in riddles.
So yeah: FOSDEM 2026 was awesome. I’ll do my best to be back in 2027.
And if you were there and we didn’t get to say hi, let’s do that next time, because meeting people and sharing ideas is what is cool about FOSDEM.
See you next year.
⚡ Surprise me again: tell me about your unexpected AtomVM use case. It might be an interesting story worth sharing. 🚀
Support my work on AtomVM: sponsor me on GitHub ❤️