Day -2 (monday 2025-06-02)

My travels started on Monday the 2nd. I got up early, grabbed a cup of coffee and checked in on things before heading for the airport. It's a great thing I did as I managed to block some scrapers that were causing the python mass rebuild to go very very slowly. Pesky scrapers. Then 2 hour drive to the airport in Portland. Some traffic, but no real delays. Then a quick bite to eat and my first flight: PDX to AMS. It's about a 9 hour flight, which is pretty crazy, but I definitely like it better than more smaller hops. There's less to go wrong.

As a side note, I cannot stress to others enough how much noise canceling headphones really make plane flights more bearable. They cut off the nasty drone of the engines/wind and make it vastly less painfull. I wore my headphones with noise canceling on all the time, even when I wasn't listening to anything.

On these long flights I can't really sleep, so I like to read ebooks and catch up on podcasts. This flight I listened to some great song exploder episodes ( "our house" and "everybody wants to rule the world") and some radiolab and others.

Then arrival in AMS. I only had a 1.5 hour layover, which it turned out was just perfectly timed. I managed to get through the customs line and to the new gate just before they started boarding for Pague. They did make me check my bag here because the flight was so full, but that was fine.

Day -1 (tuesday 2025-06-03)

Got into Prague, got my bag and got a uber to the hotel. The hotel checkin was not until 3pm according to their website but they managed to already have my room ready, so I was able to check in and decompress.

I then met Carl and Noel at a resturant nearby for a nice lunch. We chatted on all kinds of topics.

Back to the hotel to relax a bit. I was determined to try and stay up and go to sleep later so my schedule would shift, but then I decided to just lay down for a few minutes and bam! I did wake up around 8pm local time and went back to bed, and I did wake up early, but that was after getting a lot of sleep.

Day 0 (wed 2025-06-04)

I met up with tons of folks at breakfast at the hotel and we went over to the venue. The hotel I was staying at was about 1.5 blocks from the venue hotel, it worked out just fine.

Some of us went to a outside air food court place for lunch. It was nice. I had some tacos and we had some more conversations at the lunch table.

The afternoon I went to a meetup between fesco and council members that were present. I think there was some productive discussion there. There were a lot of suggestions on how fesco and the council could communicate more and how the council could communicate better with the communty and what sort of workflows might make sense. I think it mostly resulted in some council action items, but also on the fesco side more communication to the council on difficult topics.

After that I was off to the sponsor dinner. This is a dinner with folks from the groups/companies that sponsored flock along with fesco and council members. This time it was at a lovely resturant that was a 600+ year old underground wine cellar! https://www.napekle.cz/en/ The food was great and the conversations were also... great!

Back to the hotel and in bed around midnight.

Day 1 (thursday 2025-06-05)

Flock begins!

We had opening remarks and handoff of the Fedora Project Leader baton (wand? septere? curling boom?). I was hit by how long I have been around this community. I met Jef back in the fedora.us/fedora-extras days, almost 20 years ago now, and Matthew showing a picture of his kids when he first became FPL and now and how much they had grown. We are all getting older and we really need to bring in new folks to carry the fedora foundations forward.

Then, right after that was the 'meet your FESCo' panel. We didn't have all FESCo members present, but a good many of them. We did a quick introduction and then took questions from the audience. I'm glad Peter was there and asked about the provenpackager stuff from eariler this year. I hope answers were helpfull. There were questions all over the place, new arches, ai, workflows, provenpackagers, etc. Do view the video if you are interested.

Next I had planned to go to the forgejo talk, but then... as with so many times in this flock, I got in discussions in the 'hallway track' with people and wasn't able to make it there in time. :( I hope to catch the recording (along with many other talks).

Then lunch at the venue, but this time I signed up for the mentor/metee lunch matching. There was only 3 of us at the Infra/Releng table, but we had a great time I thought. I was happy to share what I could, and Justin and Hristo had a lot of good perspectives. I hope I helped them out, and I know they gave me things to think about. Overall it was very nice. It might have been better with more people, but I'd definitely sign up for this again at another flock.

After lunch I spent a lot of time in the hallway track talking to folks. One super great surprise was that Toshio was there! I got to chat with him a bunch over flock and it was so nice to see him again. Later the next day another person I hadn't seen in a while appeared too: Vipul! I hadn't been too much in touch with him since he moved to a new job at the UN, but it was super great to see him as well (even though I did not recognize him at first with his new glasses!).

It would likely be too hard to list all the people I talked to about all the things I talked to them about but some themes became clear:

• There was a lot of talk about AI. Yes, the usual funny stores about how AI got it wrong or was used in a stupid way, but also a lot of 'how can we leverage this stuff in a resonable way and how can we make AI more in fitting with our foundations'.

• A lot of discussion about community building, communication and bringing in new contributors.

I did mange to get to Greg's talk on "Build it and they will come" and other myths. Some great stuff there around community building. I particularly liked some of the examples, which showed things we do wrong all the time. Things to think about and leverage.

Then, thursday night we had a CLE dinner for all the members of my team in Red Hat. It turned out to be at the same place we went for lunch on tuesday, but thats fine. It was good. Some good converations there where I got to chat with Julia and Patrik (although it was kind of loud there, so it was hard hearing anything).

After that some of us rushed off to the Candy Swap. Always a fun event. This time it wasn't at the venue, but instead at a 'games cafe'. They had a full bar there and a bunch of games. It was kind of small, but it worked out ok for our crowd. After the candy swap I got to chat with Stephen about books and movies. We always catch up this way and share nice books we have read. We were joined by Peter and Troy too, so I have a list of books to look up now.

Day 2 (Friday 2025-06-06)

Friday came too early after too little sleep.

I went to the 'what about a better dist-git' talk. Some nice information there, but I think I knew much of it before. There were some good questions starting, but I got pulled out to the hallway track, so I will need to look back at those.

Some more hallway discussions and then off to the "One year in: Microsoft as a Fedora Contributor" talk by Bex. It was great to see the parts of the project that microsoft folks are contributing to, I don't think many people realize it, so it was great to get some visibility to their efforts. I'm personally very happy that Jeremy has been helping out with our signing infra and cloud uploads. Thats really important stuff that we didn't have anyone to drive forward until he was able to do so.

I really planned to go to the Fedora Server talk next, but then again I got into discussions in the hallway until I had missed it. :(

After lunch I went to some lightning talks. This was a last minute thing as the speaker in that slot was not able to be there, but wow... fedora contributors are always ready with talks a the drop of a fedora. I really liked Emma's presentation about design. It's not something developers think about or realize, but we should! Lots of other great ones too!

I went to Greg's discourse tips and tricks. Learned a few things, but I would definitely recommend people who aren't up on discourse to watch the recording. It will help you out getting started!

Then more hallway and the Fedora Council AMA. There were some good questions here and some good discussions about various council related topics. I probibly need to watch the recording even thought I was there because I was tired after a long day.

There was there some short closing remarks (even though there would be workshops the following day) from Justin. he thanked all the folks who helped make flock happen and gave info on the evening event and workshops the next day. There was one thing missing however: We should have all thanked Justin! I know flock is a massive undertaking, and I am sure there were issues I have no idea about, but from my side flock was a great success! Thank you Justin!

The evening event was a boat ride with dinner. We did this same event last time flock was in pague. It was fun then and again now. I had Troy and Evan and Jens at my dinner table and we had a bunch of great discussion about shirts, travel, home assistant, people we all knew and more. Then after dinner everyone mingled on the top deck until they kicked us off the boat around 10pm.

A group of us then went to a beer place near the hotel for a few more beers. Some more talk there about... lots of things. I managed to get back and in bed around midnight (thats the theme).

Day 3 (Saturday 2025-06-07)

The last day was workshops and breakouts. I went to the start of the initial setup hackfest, but I knew much of the information that they were going over, so I allowed myself to be pulled into the hallway again.

After lunch, I went to the distgit implementation in forgejo talk. There was some good discussion about workflows and how things could work. We did get a bit off topic I think with talking about provenpackagers, but I guess it's all related. I'm really looking forward to us using forgejo here.

I did go to Aurélien's improve fedora infra applications, but again I kind of knew the background here, so I got pulled off into some other things:

• I had a (I hope) nice talk with Peter about server setup and deliverables. I do owe him some more docs/info on one part of it I could not happen to recall, but hopefully this gives him info he needs to work on the server deliverables some more.

• A talk with a few folks about plans for handling the matrix spam issues. We came up with some proposed short term and longer term plans. Look for plans asking for feedback in the coming weeks. We really need to get things workable there.

• A nice talk with the person who actually started the opensuse foundation. He was there looking to see if it would be useful to start a fedora one. I don't know the answer, but It sounded very interesting.

• Got to catch up on ARM stuff with Peter (another one). Always great to talk to him and hopefully we can find some ways forward for the x1e / snapdragon laptops sooner rather than later.

• The new FPL, Jef. I was in several conversations with him. He seemed to be keeping afloat with all the stuff going on, which I thought was amazing. I'm sure he will be a great FPL.

• Some good discussions with Greg. He's on my team at Red Hat and working with myself and Fabian on infra, so we were able to have a few higher bandwith discussions that should help us in the coming weeks.

• Got to catch up a bit with Fabian on a bunch of topics.

• Had a few nice discussions with Brendan (my grand boss).

After things closed out a bunch of us went to a Dim Sum place nearby for dinner. More books discussion, along with travels and interesting places.

I went back to the hotel and crashed before 9am, which was good, because my flight to AMS was at 6am the next day.

Day 4 (Sunday 2025-06-08)

Travel back home. Got a cab with Brendan at 4am, got to the airport, through security and onto my first flight in time at 6am. Then, in AMS, walking accross the airport, grabbed a quick breakfast and got to the terminal in time to get on my AMS to PDX flight. On the way back my usual podcast and books didn't work because I was so sleepy. It was hard to pay attention. So, instead I watched a few movies: the new marvel captain america one and the second dune movie. Both were ok, but nothing super amazing. My flight from AMS left at 10am, and arrived in PDX at 11am the same day, but it was definitely not a 1 hour flight.

I was worried about customs coming back to the US, but it turned out that they just asked me if I had any food, I said nope, they said ok.

Then the 2 hour drive home. I was pretty sleepy at this point, but I got some cafene and was able to make it home fine finally. There was a lot of stop and go traffic this time, which was anoying, so the drive took an extra hour or so.

Health and diet

I'm going to digress here about heath, diet and conferences, so if that doesn't interest you, feel free to skip it.

I gained weight on this trip, and thats unfortunately pretty usual. I think there's several reasons for this. If you are traveling you may not have much choice of food, or might not know when next you will get food. Breakfast is often included in hotels, and it's almost always a 'all you can eat' buffet type thing. I can eat a lot.

But also, conferences always seem to put food in front of you, and I am pretty bad about just eating food if it's there. I don't want it to go to waste, and it's something I do as a background.

Of course the simple answer is to just have more willpower and eat smaller amounts, but it's not simple to do that sometimes. I don't know if there's much that could be done from a conference point of view. I guess less food with coffee/tea/water breaks? Or moving away from buffets?

Anyhow, something to think about.

Matrix spam

The horrific matrix spam ramped up before flock and measures were put into place that blocked it. Some of those measures are pretty heavy handed, but we really did not want to have to handle this junk at flock. As I mentioned above we did some up with some plans, and I hope we can make things still safe but more open soon.

Some links

The fedora youtube channel should have talk recordings soon: https://www.youtube.com/@fedora

The list of talks and slides, etc: https://cfp.fedoraproject.org/flock-to-fedora-2025/schedule/

comments? additions? reactions?

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