After three days at a metal festival, I realized something sad. In the software world, we don’t have fun at work anymore. I am not talking about the HR-inspired fun; I am talking about the joy that comes from the inside. I want to change that and challenge you to bring back our fun using FOSS.

My career in IT started as a servant to programmers, fixing a line or two in the code, and now I am a director in a vast international privacy company. If I look back, it was different. Oh gosh, we had so much fun in the past.

Do you remember the chair rowing? Do you remember us singing IT songs and directing movies about Java while writing funny RFCs?
Recently, most of the world decided that IT is an elite profession that needs to produce only value no matter what.

This is a great tragedy, and we should rectify it. Why do we have feelings, emotions, and personalities if we no longer have fun?

In this talk, I will take you on a retrospective journey through the years to see what went wrong and how we fix it together. It’s more like an art provocation than talk, so please keep your mind open to learn something new.

The last part of the talk will be about Heavy metal and Thunderbird. How could we use Heavy metal to unlock the emotions and skills that define us as humans, and how can we use them to start contributing to one or more open source projects?