Every year we open our doors to the community in order to support the largest European event for free and open source software: FOSDEM. A lot of people, also locals, don’t know that Brussels hosts one of the biggest FOSS events in the world, with a lot of technical talks and great people to meet, all for free. This time we had a team of 30 developers from GNOME coming for the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest.
If you don’t use Linux you’ve probably never heard of it. GNOME is a free (as in freedom) desktop environment used by most Linux distributions. At the Betacowork there’s an interesting group of Linux users, including me and our latest convert: Stefania. In fact if you are reading this webpage you are also using Linux, which powers the server of our website and most of the Internet (Google too.) Our coworking space runs 100% on Linux.
But let’s get back to the subject… 30 developers from around the world gathered at the Betacowork for a few days to work together, share their knowledge, and take decisions. And what’s the historic part? Well, they decided to use JavaScript as the default programming language for their future development. It may sound trivial to the uninitiated, but if you know a few programmers you probably understand the depth and feelings stirred by this decision. They were fully aware and decided to make a choice to move forward:

at the end of the day, we had to recognize that no language is perfect and there will always be disagreement. The important thing was that we had to make a decision

As far as I know, the final decision was among Python and JavaScript.
These are some of the articles and resources about their work:

And all we got in return is this TOTALLY AWESOME poster 🙂 Looking forward to host you again soon!
Awesome thank you poster from Gnome for the best coworking in Brussels: the Betacowork :)