Live from Buenos Aires with Rob Pike, Monty Widenius, SJVN, and more. You don’t even need a plane ticket, just travel to your living room.
On Tuesday morning, Nerdearla 2026 gets off the ground in Buenos Aires and runs through Saturday September 26.
If you’re from the US, even if you’re a die-hard open source follower, you can be excused for asking, “What’s Nerdearla?” After all, we ‘Muricans — that is, we folks in the US — have worked hard to earn our reputation for being so smug that we think if it doesn’t happen somewhere in the 50 states, then it probably isn’t worth our attention.
I jest, of course. Mostly…
Argentina is very much American, and Nerdearla just so happens to be not only Argentina’s largest free technology conference, but the largest free-tech event in Latin America, and the entire Spanish-speaking world.
That’s a big world. In case you don’t know, there are at least 100 million more native Spanish speakers on the planet than there are native English speakers, which makes Nerdearla a pretty important happening. Tomorrow marks its 13th opening — actually there’s been more if you count some Nerdearla events in other countries, such as the additional events it held in Mexico City and Santiago, Chile in 2024.
The Mexico City outing was particularly noteworthy, since it featured an onstage interview with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg just months after he picked a very public fight with the WordPress hosting company WP Engine, which we covered on FOSS Force.
Big speakers with big names at Nerdearla don’t start or end with Mullenweg. Past speakers have included the likes of Vint Cerf, Gabriela González, Jon “maddog” Hall, Cory Doctorow, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, and Radia Perlman to name just a few.
Given that sort of marquee talent, it’s amazing that the show is free, the entire five days of it.
And if you want to go, you don’t even have to pay airfare to Argentina to take part, although you can if you want to be there in person. The entire event is livestreamed, so instead of going to the airport you can just go to the living room and pick up the remote.
Who’s On Tap?
Tuesday’s opener is online only, with the four days that follow being both livestreamed and in-person. As expected, there are more than a couple of internationally known speakers on the agenda. Also, if you’re like me and only speak English, you will in no way be left out. While most of the presentations are in Spanish, a large number are in English. For example, seven of Tuesday’s scheduled presentations will be in English.
Finding English language presentations is easy, since the event’s online schedule includes a clickable filter for narrowing the selection to English presentations only. Oh, and if you’re afraid you won’t feel at home attending an event that targets Spanish speakers, the opening presentation on the Blue Stream (it’s what the Nerd folks call tracks) is called “Model Context Protocol in Plain English.” It’s by Nate Barbettini, who’s known for “OAuth and OpenID Connect in Plain English.”
Starting 20 minutes before Barbettini on the Red Stream will be another English language presentation: an interview with Rob Pike who spent twenty years at Bell Laboratories and who wrote the books The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment with Brian Kernighan.
Skipping ahead and hitting the high points (again, for a more linear play-by-play, see the schedule), Monty Widenius, the creator of MySQL and MariaDB, will be giving the opening keynote on Thursday, followed by a presentation — “Increasing Velocity with AI” — from Arnie Katz, the CTO and chief product officer at GoFundMe.
Later the same day will be two back-to-back panel discussions on the schedule, led by Leandro Colombo Viña, starting with “Getting Started in Open Source Development” with Anna Widenius (Monty Widenius’s spouse who is also the CEO of the MariaDB Foundation), Stormy Peters, Hilary Carter, and Megan Knight. After that will be “Beyond The Code: The Philosophy and Power of Open Source Leadership,” with D. Richard Hipp, Monty Widenius, Roger Dingledine, Robin Bender Ginn, and Madelyn Olson.
Among the 15 English presentations scheduled for Friday are two that’re on my “must see” list: Peter Zaitsev’s talk on “Open Source in the Age of AI,” which will be followed by an interview with Steven J Vaughan-Nichols, who’s been reporting on tech and open source since CP/M-80 was the upcoming greatest thing and WordStar was as good as word processors would ever get.
And then there’s Saturday… but you can look at the schedule for that.
Wanna Go?
If all this sounds good to you, all you have to do is register, grab some popcorn, and put the phone on “do not disturb.”
It’s all free, so you won’t even have to hunt for your wallet.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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