The Buenos Aires-based free open source conference also schedules a return to Santiago as well as a trip to Spain in 2027.
It’s starting to look like this is becoming “Open Source Conference Week” at FOSS Force. Next week we’ve gotta broaden our coverage.
We spent the first part of the week covering Raleigh’s All Things Open, and I’m still not through reporting on that.
Since returning home, however, it’s come to my attention that Nerdearla, the biggest open source conference in Latin America, isn’t through with 2026 yet. In November, it’ll be pitching its metaphorical tent for Nerdearla Mexico 2026.
Nerdearla’s flagship event in Buenos Aires already took place in late September. That event — which among other things featured an onstage interview with Steven J Vaughan-Nichols — drew a whopping 12,000 people on-site while more than 30,000 watched online, which is about par for the event. By comparison, All Things Open, the largest open source conference on the US East Coast, reported about 6,500 registrations in 2025.
Nerdearla Mexican Style
This will be Nerdearla’s second appearance in Mexico City, with the first being a three-day event in 2024. This year the programming has been extended to four days — November 18-21 — and like all Nerdearla events, it’s being offered without charge, thanks to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Spin (a Mexican digital-financial-services business), Valkey, Devin (an AI agent for software developers), and others.
“The conference is 100% free since we started,” the event’s founder, Ariel Jolo, told me at the time of the first Mexico City outing. “All editions, all countries, all everything, virtual and in person. It’s all 100% free. The sponsors make it possible for us to run a free conference.”
The first day will be online only, and the other three days will be presented live and in person, but also livestreamed.
What If I Only Speak English?
Like all Nerdearla events, most presentations will be in Spanish, but “international headliners” will present in English. The lineup for us folks who only understand English is pretty impressive:
- Dan’l Lewin, who co-founded NeXT alongside Steve Jobs, and spent 17 years as an executive at Microsoft, in an interview that will stream on the event’s opening day.
- Mary Ann Horton, internet pioneer who contributed to BSD UNIX and vi, and was one of the first transgender rights advocates, speaks on November 20.
- Dr. Knicole Colon, astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and operations project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, closes the November 20 program.
- Harlan Stenn, NTP project lead and founder of Network Time Foundation, on the 2036 NTP era rollover, the 2038 time_t rollover and the 2038 GPS week rollover, will stream on November 18.
- John Willis, co-author of “The DevOps Handbook” and senior director of the Global Transformation Office at Red Hat, will speak on November 19.
- Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona and co-author of “High Performance MySQL,” on what databases reveal about the true cost of Kubernetes, will speak on November 19.
Spanish-language sessions include Victor Nunez of OpenAI; GitHub’s Andrea Griffiths; Lorena Bravo, head of security and AI for Google Cloud Latin America; and David Arturo Amor Quiroz, scikit-learn core maintainer and co-founder of Probabl, and many more.
Registration and Upcoming Conferences for Nerdearla Nerds
Nerdearla will be continuing to spread its wings in 2027, with a return to Santiago, Chile in April, the main event in Buenos Aires in September, and a venture out of Latin America and across the Atlantic to Madrid in November.
There’s also good news for us stateside. The event’s organizers say they’re in the early planning stage for the first Nerdearla on US soil, in Austin, Texas in 2028. Right now, it’s a “details to be announced” situation, but the organization is already directing sponsorship inquiries to nerdearla.com/en/sponsors.
As for Mexico City, the event’s complete schedule and the speaker lineup are available online, and registration for both in-person attendance and livestreaming is already open.
“Mexico has one of the largest and fastest-growing developer communities in the Americas, and we want it to have the same access to world-class speakers that Buenos Aires has had for twelve years, at no cost,” Ariel Jolo said in a statement. “Whether someone walks into Expo Reforma or watches from Chicago or Barcelona, every session and every recording stays free.”
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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