beware, this is going to be pretty long. I split these up by day in the past, but somehow this time I just kept adding to one post. We start with 2 days before and wrap up with some general thoughts.
Day -2 (monday, 2024-08-05): travel day. When I originally booked my travel I had a nice set of two flights in the afternoon/evening and all was fine, but then they canceled my first flight and rebooked me on a much earlier flight. So, I got up around 4am, showered and grabbed coffee and off to the airport. I had left a bunch of room in case traffic in portland was bad, but it turned out of course that it was fine and I had lots of time. Then to MDW for a 5 hour layover. Had a beer and a chicken sandwitch and caught up on email a bit there. Then, my second (and last) flight from MDW to ROC. This was supposed to be just over an hour, but turns out we had to wait about 45m for a connecting flight to arrive, then when we got almost to landing, it turned out there was a bunch of rain, so they had to circle around for another 30min or so. Then a quick taxi to the hotel and I crashed hard.
Day -1 (tuesday, 2024-08-06): I had planned a day before to recover from travel and try and get used to the time zone differences. I did manage to sleep in a bit and then met up with ab and ngompa for breakfast. We discussed all kinds of things and had a very nice time I think. I then went over to the coffee shop off the lobby for a bit of hacking and met up with a few more fedorans that were arriving. Then, off to dinosaur bbq for lunch. Was quite good! After lunch got together with some folks to talk about gitforge requirements. Added some to the investigation. Then, off to the leadership dinner with a bunch of other folks. Sadly a number of folks coming in today had travel problems (there were a bunch of really big rainstorms on the east coast of the US). Some of them had to take a train from NYC and only would arrive the afternoon of the next day. By the end the schedule had 20 revisions.
Day 1 – (wed – 2024-08-07): Flock begins! After a quick breakfast, off to…
- the opening “state of fedora” talk from mattdm. A few charts and graphs, but some good things to think about too.
- Next up was the FESCo roundtable. We started out with questions seeded from Aoife and then got a number of good ones from the audience as well. There was talk about recent decisions FESCo made, looks to all the upcoming possible changes and the future as well. I think it was great and we got some good questions. We kind of ran out of time in the end.
- A quick break and then on to the Council town hall. Again some great discussions and questions.
- I wanted to go to the Infrastructure projects talk after that, but I got sidetracked by the hallway track, talking to several folks I haven’t seen in person in a while.
- A lunch break and then on to introducing Konflux. This was only a 25min talk, but I also hung around after and asked some more questions. If everything pans out the way it’s envisioned, I think Konflux could be really great for us. It would allow us in theory to replace koji, bodhi, compose hosts, signing hosts, autosign hosts, some ci infra, a bunch of scripting around uploading and syncing things, and likely more. It’s still of course super early days, but I think it’s got a lot of promise. There’s a test instance setup now to allow maintainers to test builds and see how things look. I have a tab open to play with this after I get back.
- Next to continue the ‘big changes’ theme, I went to the Git Forge replacement talk. There’s example services setup here too to allow folks to look at forejo or gitlab. I’m hoping we can have a pretty good timeline to get the evaluations in and make a decision and look at deployment.
- Another quick coffee break and off to the Lean Coffee session. It was interesting. We broke into two groups and everyone around each table would write a topic on a card. Then we each voted for our top two items and then starting with the one with the most votes we discussed them each for 5minutes then if the majority wanted to continue we did another 5 minutes. We had a bunch of varied topics including: How to recognize contibutors more. How to consolidate or make contributing to docs easier. How to better handle SIGs and communication between them and the rest of the project. Some good thoughts.
- After that was my talk: Matrix: the red pill and the blue pill. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to fill up the time, but I almost ran out of time. Hopefully folks know better now how matrix is setup and the limitations and advantages it has. I will be uploading my slides next week for anyone who wants them. Basically the first part of the talk is the things you need to know as a user who is just trying to use Matrix and the second half was about how things worked and more ‘geeky’ details.
- Another round of hallway track talking to lots of different folks about lots of different things.
- The evening event was a board game/candy swap/karioke night in the hotel. The candy swap was super fun, it gets bigger and bigger every year. Lots of candy/snacks from all over the world and lots of great stories about them from all the fedorans there. I had even more good conversations about books, package signing, vegatables, and more. I called it a night after the karioke.
Day 2 – (thursday – 2024-08-08): The next morning started out with 2 great talks:
- “It’s OK to not know things” was great advice in any field, but definitely in software/operating systems. I’d suggest you go watch the recording of this one as soon as it’s available.
- Next was “How (not) to get into tech” and was a lovely history of a great progression through various roles. I suspect many of us didn’t get computer science degrees and just ‘happened’ into what we are doing today. Also there were tons of cute dog pictures.
- Next was the Fedora mentored projects showcase. Some great work from lots of people. One great takeaway here is that when you mentor someone, then they mentor a few people, soon you have helped an entire tree of people.
- I stuck to the large room for the lenovo updates. Super glad lenovo is shipping Fedora on some of their machines, and using pretty much exactly what we ship. Sad that its not so easy to find the ones you can get with fedora, but at least they are there. Lots of new models, newly supported things coming up.
- I wanted to go to the framework talk, but I got caught up in the hallway track talking to people. I’ll try and catch it once the videos are up. After that was lunch and more discussions and talking with folks.
- I got in and joined the risc-v talk already in progress (Another one(s) to watch later) and chimed in with info about the new risc-v koji hub we want to setup (hw is there, needs racking and setup).
- Dan Walsh then did a great inro to bootc talk. The entire bootc setup is very interesting and it’s going to make things so much nicer down the road once we bootc all the things. looking forward to it.
- There were several talks I wanted to go to then, but again went on to hallway track. I also poked a bit at the mass resigning of rawhide with the new f42 key for next week.
- The day ended up with a Q&A from Mike Mcgrath. A number of questions around AI/ML things and discussion of open source and how things might look in the next few years. Surprisingly not many questions about source code or rebuilds.
- The day ended with a dinner at the Strong Museum of play. We went there at the last flock that was in Rochester and I remember it being fun. This time was no different, it was awesome to talk to yet more folks and then play some classic video games I remember from long ago. Gauntlet Legends was fun, Rampage, ghost busters, and centipede were all there. I used to be great at centipede, but I was really bad now. Just need to get one at home.
Day 3 – (friday – 2024-08-09):
Friday morning was all about the Infrastructure and Release Engineering workshop/hackfest that I organized. We started pretty close to 9am and kept working away with a few breaks until 1pm when lunch was ready. We had gathered a list of topics we wanted to discuss beforehand and went though them one by one. We actually did manage to at least touch on all of them. Notes were collected in our hack md doc I’m planning on reading through there this week and filing tickets for things as well as posts about plans we made. I was very happy that there were a few folks who aren’t normally involved in Infra and Releng there. They chimed in on various topics like gitlab migrations, openshift configurations, ara setup, what still needs some old packages we wanted to get rid of and more. It was great to get some outside perspectives on things. I’d like to thank everyone who came! Toward the end we managed to archive a bunch of old github projects in our fedora-infra space. We came up with a plan to get commops access to datagrepper data for analytics and much more.
The afternoon Met up with Some folks and managed to figure out the AWS permissions issue that was blocking us from replacing fedimg. Hurray. Also a lot of discussion around sigul lockup debugging and secure boot chain. I wanted to go to the epel10 workshop/hackfest, but it was more important to fix up those things while I had the people involved right there to look at things.
Dinner friday night was a really nice team dinner with a bunch of co-workers. It was a big anoying that as the evening went on the place filled up with people and the base volume got higher and higher. After a point I couldn’t hear anyone at all. Some of us did move away to a far corner and it was much better there, but oh well, I guess thats how it goes on a friday night.
Day 4 – (saturday – 2024-08-10):
Saturday was the mentor summit. I started to be involved in that, but then there were some folks who had some fires/blockers so I went and helped out where I could. For some reason the openqa test cluster in aws was all stopped. I restarted it and will be looking into what could have happened to it or how we can log what might have happened to it. I then dealt with some signing issues around the mass resigning and sigul lockups. Then there was a lot of great hallway track discussion on all kinds of topics
The conference ended up with a readout from a lot of folks, which I think is a great tradition. Lots of perspectives on what happened and got discussed. I tossed in my few cents.
Dinner ended up being 4 of us at a pretty nice ramen place. Good food and conversations.
Day +1 – (sunday – 2024-08-11):
Sunday had some folks going on a group trip to Niagra Falls, but I wanted to get on home, so my travel home day was sunday. Sadly, my flight was super early and I was car pooling to the airport with some other folks who left even eariler, so I had to get up at about 3:45am to meet up in the lobby at 4:30am and catch my 6:45am flight. My flight had Troy on it too, so we had some breakfast after we landed at Midway. Good to get a bit more discussion and I hadn’t had much time with Troy during the conference. Managed to land around a hour late. Then the 2 hour drive home and finally I am able to crash.
Some general thoughts on the conference in no particular order:
- I wish I had had a chance to get a picture with my boss, his boss, his boss and his boss that were all there at various times. Would have made an amusing org chart thing.
- For whatever reason I seem to have spent a lot of time with Jeremy, David, and AB, but that was great as they are all wonderful humans.
- To me it seemed like there was a lot of energy around all the changes that might be coming in Fedora: Konflux, new git forge, bugzilla replacement, and more. Of course you can’t predict the future, but I am pretty hopeful of all these changes.
- I was sad that a number of folks couldn’t make it this time: pjones, jforbes, ausil, pbrobinson, and a bunch of folks from my work team and more.Just bad luck/timing I think, hopefully will see many of them next year.
- Flock always leaves me weary in body, but energized in spirit.
Look for a post on the discussion from the infra and releng workshop later this week.
