Last week I attended Flock, the Fedora Project's annual contributor conference in Budapest, Hungary. The conference was full of "open-source-geeks", project leads, GSoC and Outreachy interns, and the Fedora project contributors (kind of obvious :P).
The conference began with the registration, where I got an I-Card, a Flock shirt and a lot of cool stickers, tattoos, and pins! The first talk was held by the Fedora Project Leader - Matthew Miller, where he discussed the current state of Fedora, the future tasks and objectives. After that, we had some coffee and attended the Facebook loves Fedora talk by Michel and Joseph. The talk primarily focussed on using Fedora as the desktop operating system for Facebook employees. Post lunch, the next talk I attended was "Improving Packaging XP with Automation" by Neal and Igor. The talk aimed to ease the load on the packager, and get feedback from the audience about the same. The main issue discussed was the age-old build failures due to dependency changes. After that was the talk about the benefits of Podman over Docker by Dan Walsh. The main highlight of the talk was the security benefits of Podman over Docker. After that, I attended the talk by Ben Cotton on "Changing the Change Process". Ben presented the topic much more effectively and in a humorous way. It is also one of the GSoC projects. The main task is to create a CLI tool, in order to reduce the manual labor of the Change-Wrangler (basic copy-paste stuff). This marked the end of day one.
Day two began with an interesting talk about cross-distro (mainly OpenSUSE) packaging, by Igor. We took into account the Python and Ruby ecosystem, how their packages are effectively different in the distros. I could relate to some of the discussion topics as well, given the fact that I have only packaged a few tools and libraries (that too for Arch :P). The next talk was about Release-Bot, a bot to manage the GitHub software releases which can be called by just creating an issue. I have to say this was the only talk I was able to understand fully (I was working on it before). Marek lead the talk, where he showed a demo of the bot and how it manages the releases. After that, I took part in a talk about User Testing and why it is important, by Renata. The talk highlighted the importance of user research for improving the interactivity of a product. Several testing methods were also discussed during the talk. After lunch, I attended the talk on Neuro Fedora - the one talk that I had been looking up to since the beginning. Neuro Fedora is nothing but an initiative to provide Fedora as a fully-packaged platform for scientific (mainly NeuroScience) applications. I felt really attracted to the specific project because of my interest in quantitative studies and packaging. The next talk was on maintaining the packaged release for any change in the upstream repository. The tool being talked about here is packit and the packit-service. That talk was taken by Tomas, who gave a birds-eye view on the motivation behind the development of the tool, and a discussion on how packit will affect the modern era packaging/maintainership. That was the end of the talks for me, for the day. The next major activity was the River Cruise!! At evening, we all assembled at the port looking for the cruise, and we ended up walking for around 15-20 minutes in the hot sun still looking for the boat. It was quite fun, walking on the docks with new people and interacting with them on the way to the boat. We were served cold champagne when we entered the boat, and the food looked really delicious. As the boat moved around the island of Margaret, we got to see the city and it was beautiful. We saw some interesting monuments and buildings (from the river) and they looked beautiful. Everyone was enjoying the view and talking and having fun on the cruise. I got to know about the different kinds of cheese from Misc. I would also like to mention the "massage plane" that flew over us two times.
The next day began with the Summer Projects showcase by the GSoC and Outreachy interns. There were a whole lot of cool projects, and I would like to mention Release-Bot and Change-Management-Tool again, as they looked really impressive (to me). Next up was an introductory workshop on Packit. The workshop showcased how one could install and set up the service on the source/upstream and manage how it performs in the downstream. I personally faced a lot of issues in the workshop (because I was using Arch Linux, and one of the Python libraries were messing up). I ended up running the service successfully on a virtual machine. The next activity planned was the walking tour. We all went to the Parliament through busses and explored the city in little groups. Each group had a tour guide assigned who would explain about the monuments as we walked past them. The tour guides told us about the historical kings, movements, and a lot more about the monuments. We were also lucky to be able to observe the lowering of the flag ceremony in front of the Parliament. We also visited the St. Stephen's Basilica and the St. Stephen's Castle. We walked through the Chain Bridge and observed the amazing architecture of the city. The tour ended at around 20:00 and everyone were pretty tired from all the walking around the city. :P
The next day was kind of slow for me, as it was the last day of the conference. I was able to attend only the FESCo meetup, where everyone was discussing their problems and future tasks. The event was then wrapped up by Matthew, the FPL.
I made some really great friends during Flock 2019 and am really amazed by the work they do for Fedora. I am really proud of being able to attend Flock 2019 and would like to thank Bex and Jen and the whole Fedora community for providing such a wonderful experience.
SCRIBBLE NOTES
Finally, I had to switch from Arch to Fedora, because I would now love to explore the world of RPMs and have a look at how they work. I look forward to contributing to Neuro Fedora (another reason I had to switch) and Fedora Badges.