Flock-2019

Flock is the Fedora Project's annual contributor-focused conference. I attended Flock-2019 which was in Budapest this time. I feel great to be a part of this conference and community. It was four day conference with lots of interesting sessions.

PC: Pravin Satpute

Day 1
First day started with "The State of Fedora" session by Matthew Miller where he discussed about Fedora current and future state. Then Cate Huston presented a very interesting talk on how we can make a great and successful team. She shared interesting facts to make failing team functional. It was good to see "Facebook Loves Fedora" and Facebook employees are using it. In this they shared their experience and challenges faced. After lunch I attended "The future of langpacks in Fedora", it was a great discussion on langpacks. In evening I attended Fedora CI by David and  Tim Flink and Getting started with Fedora QA by Suprith Gangawar and Geoffrey Marr. Day 1 ended with Slideshow Karaoke organised by Amita and Adam Samalik.

                                 

Day 2
On second day, I attended the talk by Denise Dumas on "Fedora, Red Hat and IBM. Then I mostly attended the talks around Fedora CI and gating. Also attended session on "Use cases for Transtats in the Fedora Community". It was a day well spent with so much information on Continuous Integration. Then in the evening we enjoyed the River Cruise with Dinner.

Day 3
Third day started with the showcasing of Fedora Summer Coding 2019 projects where Summer Coding interns talked about their  projects, learning and experiences. Same day we have our Fedora internationalization hack fest where we discussed about how we can increase CI for Fedora i18n packages and did some brainstorming for future release. It was very helpful for me as I got ideas about the high priority packages and how we can contribute more to CI.

Also, I was a part of Fedora Diversity and Inclusion Hack fest which was just after i18n hack fest, so after that I quickly moved to D&I hack fest room where we worked and discussed on some pending tickets and took the action items from those. Also planned for the future elections for next Diversity Advisor. Then in the end there was a walking tour planned around Budapest where we visited some tourist attraction points and learnt some facts about the history of Budapest.


Day 4
On Day 4, I attended the Wrap-Up session and collaborated with people and had some good discussions. This was the last day, most of us were already leaving so there were good byes, future planning etc.

Overall, it was a great experience, as being a part of community it felt good to be meet people and talk to them. It was good to see so many talks about CI and gating and I attended most of them, as I myself is starting to contribute to CI and gating, so these sessions were very helpful and informative.

Below are few pics clicked while different activities in Flock :)

                                 

Fedora Pune Meetup

Last Saturday(June,15) , we had Fedora Pune Meetup with Fedora-30 release celebration. When I reached the venue, people were already present there and were ready to start the event. We started according to the agenda with our first talk from Pravin Satpute on Fedora-30 features which was great, as people were really interested in knowing the new features added.

After that Parag delivered a talk on Modularity. He covered the basics and also covered some examples to make the concept more clear. We had had good discussions around this topic as question were coming in between from the audience. After such a technical discussion a break was really needed. So we went for a short break to grab some snacks.

Then, there was a talk on Fedora CoreOS by Praveen Kumar after the break with a disclaimer that he is only the presenter, slides are prepared by Sinny Kumari. It was a great session with demo and a lot of interactions among attendees. After his session Kushal quickly discussed about QubeOS which was new to me and also interesting. Then we ended the event with Cake cutting to celebrate the release of Fedora-30.

Flock- 2018

I attended Flock this year which is the Fedora Project's annual contributor-focused conference. This was my first Flock and it turned out be one of the best conferences I have attended so far.

It was a total 4 day event, where I got a chance to learn more about fedora, how things are changing in fedora and meet people face to face. There were many exciting things in Flock besides talks like hack fest, workshop and many activities like Yoga, Candy swap, Scavenger Hunt which made it more interesting.

Day-1:

The day started with the morning Yoga. Then the first keynote on "State of Fedora" where Fedora Project leaders talked about their objectives and editions. It was really helpful in understanding what are the new changes and how they are going to effect the community. There were lot of interesting talks from which I selected few, which were "RHEL,Fedora and CentOS: Solving the Pentose Triangle" by Josh Boyer and Brendan Conoboy. After this I attended a talk on "Desktop testing using dogtail and behave" by Petr Schindler  as I want to know more about desktop testing and the framework he was using for this. After the talk we also had a great discussion about the framework, it was really great to know more about desktop testing.

After this there was Candy Swap event which was organised by Justin Flory, where people from different country bought candies , I also took some Indian candies and sweets to share with others.was a great event, got to taste lot of candies from various regions .

Day-2: 

It started with keynote: "The Power of One:For the good of community" by Rebecca Fernandez which was really motivating as she talked about how we can bring change to the community which are good for others and how we can make a change in the community which we are wishing for. Then I attended a workshop on "Imposter Syndrome and Unconscious Bias Training" by Jona Azizaj, Justin Flory, Bee Padalkar, Amita Sharma as I want to understand how this can be identified and how we can overcome this. This was a interactive workshop where we identified are we suffering from this Syndrome or not and how we can manage it in our life and workplace.

 Then I attended talk on "Fedora CI:Process, Progress and Infrastructure" by bstinson as I have strated contributing to CI and want to know more about the process. After this I attended a talk on "Scalable Fedora Design" by Abhishek Sharma where he shared his knowledge on design system and how Fedora can embraces a design system to ensure consistency and manage design debt.

The day ended with Scavenger Hunt which was organised in the Downtown(Dresden) where we got to know about some interesting facts and history of Dresden. It was really fun going around the city and completing the tasks given. Thanks to the organizers Dominika Bula,Brian Exelbierd , Jennifer Madriaga. I really enjoyed acting a scene from a movie where we in-acted a scene from a bollywood movie "Sholey".

Day-3:

We had hackfect on "i18n development and testing" postlunch. In morning I had a discussion with Lukas about OpenQA as I need to discuss some issues. He told me about how they are using it and his framework which he build to create needles. It was really great to know we can create needles and use them for OpenQA without using OpenQA needles editor with this framework. As I am using OpenQA for automation so it was a great help. We had great discussion about OpenQA which cleared many doubts of mine.
Post lunch we had our hack-fest, where we discussed about the following topics:

• Upstream First Testing
• Automation
• New Features(Langpacks, Fonts etc)

It was great to have this hack fest, as now we were clear on many things and know how we can proceed further with Upstream First and CI initiative. 

After this we went for Dinner at Roller Coaster Restaurant where everything came rolling to us, it was fun :P. There also I had discussion with lot of people. I met a guy from opensuse with whom I talked about OpenQA, also had some healthy conversation with Dodji about exercise, diet and health. It was a great evening spent well with great people.

Day-4:

On the last day most of my time I spent socializing with different people from different domains. I also attended lightening talk to gather more knowledge in less time. All the lightening talks were awesome. After this we had group photo followed by Wrap up Session.

The conference was really good, as I got to know people who can be bugged for specific issues and with whom I can discuss various issues. I also really enjoyed the various events at flock and stayed fit by attending the morning Yoga session . Thanks Suzanne Yeghiayan for taking these session.

Next day, we(Pravin, Sinny, Mike, Praveen, Sayan) went to Saxon Switzerland for a trek, it was great trek with you guys. Thanks Mike for taking us to such a beautiful place.

Thanks everyone for making this a awesome conference.

Fedora Pune Meetup and Fedora 28 Release Party

 

On June 30,2018 we had Fedora Pune meetup at RedHat office, along with Fedora 28 release celebration.

Pravin Satpute started the meetup by a welcome note and a quick introduction session. After this Parag presented a talk on Modularity. As most of the audience were new, so he started with very basic concepts like repository, package, compose,  koji, bodhi , fedora build cycle. After making the people comfortable he started to talk about Modularity and explained the need and purpose to introduce this feature ie Too Fast vs Too Slow.

 

 After this we had quick 10 mins break, where swags were distributed and everyone was happy to get swags :)

After the break the audience was divided in groups according to the interest as some want to know how they can create a FAS account, some want to know about how to earn badges and some about how we can contribute to Fedora.

Suprith and Ompragash lead the group who didn’t had a FAS account. They helped them to create FAS account and in the end everyone in the room was having a FAS account, which was their first step to contribute to fedora

Pravin took a session on how we can contribute to Fedora and earn badges. He explained about various badges, and how they can be earned by contributing to various projects and area.

Amita took a session how we contribute to Fedora by testing. She explained about the basics of testings and bugzilla.

Apart from these session Parag and Praveen were also having some interesting discussion around Fedora features, so some people joined them. After this we did cake cutting to celebrate Fedora-28 release and had snacks having discussions about Fedora.

It was a day well spent and great experience. Looking forward to next meetup.

FAD i18n 2017

We had i18n FAD from 20-22nd Oct in Red Hat, Pune office. Developers and QE both participated in FAD(Fedora Activity Day). So we all were excited. All preparations were done, thanks to Parag. Sundeep, Pravin and other members for their efforts to make this happen.

Day 1:
We started at 9.30. There was a introductory session by Pravin and Jens, followed by some logistics information by Parag. After this we started with planned sessions as all of us were going to discuss on the topics which we have planned by giving a small presentation.
First was Akira Tagoh who shared information about fontconfig , guidelines for defaults fonts and the tasks planned for FAD. Then Peng Wu discussed about Pango. After this we had a small break.
Fujiwara, Peng, Mike, discussed about input method, ibus. I got a lot of input from this discussions as I was going to work on Input Method Automation. Then Mike and Rafal discussed about locales.

It was lunch time by this, so we had lunch in office.
After having lunch Sundeep, Parag, Sachin gave presentation and discussed about Transtats. Then Pravin discussed about Fonts. I gave a small presentation on Input method and tasks for Automation.
Then Satya and Bhushan discussed about the Fedora i18n QA Test cases. After this Vishal who was participating remotely in FAD gave presentation and share his idea web testing.
After a small break, everyone shares their plan for the projects on which they were going to work.


Day 2:
Second day we started at 9, as everything was set and planned. We started working on our projects. I and Ompragrash were working on the Input Method Automation. So first we planned to do automation for GNOME application as well as libreoffice. So first task was to open the application in specific locale. So I decided to do for gedit and Ompragash took libreoffice. We took Korean and Chinese input method. In the first half we were able to automate to open the application in the specific language.

Next task was to enable the input method for specific language which took a bit of research, as Fujiwara and Peng Wu were there, we discussed with them and finally got the solution how we can enable the input method.
So EOD we were able to input string in the application by enabling the input method for specific language.
Then it was the time for daily sharing, we all gave demos and shared what we have done or achieved so far. It was a fruitful day for all as everyone made success on their projects.

After this it was the party time, we went Amanora where we did bowling, everyone enjoyed alot. Then we had dinner at Barbeque Nation. It was a nice evening.

Day 3:
We started at 9:00 am in morning working on our pending tasks. We already had a session planned for Modularity, we had a good discussion about Modularity, got to know many new things. After Lunch we had Fedora 27 release party in RedHat office only. Many people join us for the party where had discussion about Fedora and modularity as this is the major change in Fedora. In evening we wrap with the demos and presentation of our project.

I found it very good as I got learn many new things and also got a chance to interact with people working on different technologies. After this FAD I know whom to contact if I have any issues related to i18n , this event was good to build connection. This will help us in future.

Looking forward for next year FAD.

Fedora Women Day-Pune Sept,2017

On Sept 28,2017 we celebrated Fedora Women Day in D.Y PATIL COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, Pune. As decided we all(Amita, Satyajit, Madhuri and me) were in office at 8.30 to leave for the venue. Amita booked a cab and we headed towards the destination. When we reached the college we were welcomed by Suvarna mam. Lot of things were going on there as they were preparing for some event, some construction work was also going on. All this reminded me of my college days and my memories as a student refreshed after watching the college students busy in different tasks.

Then we had a short break as they have to shift the audience to another room due to more number of participants then expected. After the break we were ready to start the event. It was nice to see that a major part of audience were girls. Then they welcomed us with the sacred plant “Tulsi”, it was an honor to get that.

After that we started with Amita’s talk on the topic “ Women in Open Source”. She started with a motivational discussion about the facts and myths which people have about women and that boosted up the stamina of each and every girl sitting there.  Then she covered What is Fedora and how they can contribute to it. She also talked about Women in Open Source Award and shared stories of some great women. After her talk was over she asked students to come up to give their intro, tell us how they feel about it and in which part they think they can contribute according to their interest. As the students were shy, again she pushed them a bit and promised to give awesome Fedora Women Day stickers :) and Fedora Live CD’s which Praveen gave us, thanks to him for that. Then two girls came up and share their ideas. It was really a very motivating talk by Amita.

Next was Satyajit who was going to show how we can install Fedora in our laptop without messing up with the current OS or our data. As we have a discussion before with the faculty there that some student lost their whole data while installing Fedora, so here he come as a savior for those student. He very clearly explained and showed how they can safely install Fedora from an iso image without harming their data. He helped student to get started with Fedora as most of them were new to Fedora.

After Satyajit it was my turn to explain how they can install various packages and get started after installation of Fedora. So I introduced them to DNF. I gave a brief history of yum, dnf and about transition from yum to dnf. After this I showed them how they can install, update, remove packages using DNF. I gave them basic information about different commands and how they can see help or man pages. I asked some questions in the end and gave stickers to the audience. It was really a great experience with college students.

Then Madhuri came up with her talk on “Fedora loves Python” . She explained about Fedora and Python. She told them how they can contribute to Fedora and showed them different options available where they can contribute according to their interest. It was very informative.

This event was very useful, as most of the student had this in mind that they can contribute only if they know coding. But this cleared all their doubts by giving them a detailed information about the different options available where can contribute according to their interest.

After these session we gave remaining CD’s and Stickers to the students and finished the event with a thank you note. Then after lunch we were back to our office.

It was a great experience and awesome event :-)

PyLadies Meetup Event Report

We had our pyladies meetup this Saturday, last week we were not able to do as in Maharashtra, there is a festival Ganesh Chaturthi, honouring the birth of Lord Ganesha it is celebrated for ten days so we planned to do meet this week instead of last week. Again it was great meetup, started with Nisha Menon’s talk “The practical usage of Python", but unfortunately I missed it this time : ( , when I reached she was about to finish. I was late as that morning I decided to try something new in breakfast ie radish parathas that took a lot of time to prepare, but that was a good experiment as they were mouth-watering. So after having a delicious parathas with curd and pickle I reached there, and took my seat, everyone was already ready with their laptop, this time there were lot of new faces, many new student had come to attend the meetup, without delaying anymore I also get started as by that time Nisha talk was ended and she invited Trishna for her session. 

She was going to take a session on “Using WEB API in Python3 “. So before starting she just confirmed how many of us were familiar with Python basics, as it was discussed in previous meetup. But still for the new members and to brush up our knowledge she revised all the basics to keep us all on a same platform. Although it was a revision session but she explained each and everything and gave time to all of us to try the different commands on our terminal and solved everyone queries. Thanks to her for that, then she discussed about the things which we were going to do in our workshop that day. She has chosen a great topic and problem for the workshop. We were going to use the API of Zomato website. It seems very interesting as it was about food, and everyone love that. So we generated an API_KEY for that, by that time it was the time for lunch, so we all went for lunch. 

Kushal and Praveen ordered lunch for us, thanks to them to fill our hungry tummy. During lunch we all had discussion on different topics related to python and other stuffs.  Also Kushal took the students for a small walk in redhat. After lunch we all gathered in the same room named Harishchandgarh which reminds me of King HARISHCHANDRA who never lied and always kept his promise. We all were set, one of us was facing problem with her laptop, as she was having a window laptop, so it was suggested by Kushal to switch to linux as it is far easy to handle problems on it and its best if we want to contribute to development side or  to any project. So for that time a laptop was arranged for her with linux. Then we all were set to start. 

Trishna made us familiar with “requests” module in python3 which is the only Non-GMO HTTP library for Python. We all installed the requests module as it was required for the session from the below commands.

• dnf install python3-requests
  

So the task was we have to list out the nearby restaurants to our current location, for that we used the longitude and latitude to provide our current location. We wrote a python3  program for searching the restaurants, added to it also the url for menu and we were able to list the nearby restaurants with menu url near Magarpatta, the list was as below for restaurants names if someone want to visit any:

• Deccan Harvest
• Cuba Libre
• Wah Marathi Dine N Wine
• TGI Fridays
• Rajdhani Thali Restaurant
• Eagle Boys Pizza
• Charcoal Grill
• The Waffles Hut
• Barbeque Nation

Then we played with the code , Trishna assigned us to find the restaurants which have chinese cuisine and we all tried that ourself and found out one restaurants from above restaurants which have chinese cuisine => Deccan Harvest

After completing it we started playing with the code to find out the various other things like finding User rating, currency accepted, photo url for different restaurants. With this the event ended, with a discussion to meet next month.

Fedora Women's Day

Gone are those days, when women have only some selected fields to work on or they restrict themselves to some fields. In this new era our boundaries are widening, we are extending our thoughts and are coming out in the world of technology.  None of the field I guess is untouched by women, it’s difficult to name a field where we can’t see a woman. So no one is unaware about women’s caliber and so are some communities which are helping women to grow in the field of technology and computing  like Fedora women, Grace Hopper etc.

Yesterday I attended the Fedora Women’s day Celebration which I came to know was there in our office and a large number of women joined that, and that shows how we all are interested in something like this. Fedora is an open source project where anyone can contribute, it has open community. We can join Fedora and start contributing it, it’s nothing like that anyone have to be a hard core programmer with all the IT skills, anyone can contribute to it whoever have interest. Amita was the organizer of the event, the event started at 3PM, we all were there for it. The started with the talk of María “tatica” Leandro, who mainly take care of develop art, translations, marketing stuff, promoting the use of Fedora and recruit new talent to the community. And it was 5.30 in morning for her due to different timezone, still was there for us to help us and answer our question. This shows her dedication and how active she is towards the community . She shared his experience how she started her journey as a translator and talked about diversity as she is the Diversity adviser for Fedora. Being a woman she wanted a large number of women contributor for Fedora, so she was there so early and was ready to available even more early like 1 or 2 am for us for another meetups. She gave a lot of information how women can contribute to Fedora as being a women she knows we have so much other responsibilities other than our own interest and growth, and we have to balance everything in our life. She shared a lot of information about Fedora and Women in Fedora, although we have a less percentage of Women contributor in Fedora but that’s increasing and the community itself is helping women to come out with their interest and contribute in that field. Fedora has also a project named Fedora Women designed to connect and assist women who are interested in using and contributing to Fedora.  After talk with Tatica, there was a session from Pravin Satpute, he too is an active contributor to Fedora. He gave an introduction to Fedora and how anyone can start contributing Fedora. He shares the slides for different fields in which anyone can contribute depending on their interest like:

• Content Writer
• Designer
• People Person
• OS Developer
• Translator
• Web Developer or Administrator
• QA

He gave lot of information on how we can start contributing to Fedora and also can learn from them as there are meetups and other session from which we can learn things of our own interest. He answered the questions which were raised to him and it was interesting as the whole event was motivating us to do something which will be beneficial for our growth and for the community also. After this there was a talk from Anisha Narang about Fedora, women contribution and we can be active in these types of events. She shared her experience which was a help for women present there. There was another guy who had wake up early in the morning just to address us and help us with our queries Matthew Miller, he was also surprised to see a large audience. He started with his  introduction  and shared  information about Fedora.  And also we came to know he has two cute and loving daughters also whom he take care so it was a inspirations for mothers present there who want to contribute to Fedora, he also answered the questions from audience. After he ended its was 5.30 pm I guess, and we planned to end for today with a discussion for next meetups. We also had a big cake which was looking very tasty as it was Fedora Women’s Day Celebration which would be incomplete without this. So without wasting  time we cut the cake and had it. There were few other people who helped this event to be a success. First is Satya who clicked pictures for us and our cake and another Huzaifa who answered a lot of questions and shared a lot of information. So we ended this with a plan to meet every Friday so that we can be active in this and meetups every two months or every month.

My First Fedora Meetup

Yesterday I attended a Fedora meetup where we discussed about how to write Test Cases in Python. This was my first meetup after I have started learning Python. When I reached the place there were around 12 people sitting with their laptops, then I also joined them. Few people were knowing each other, few were new like me. So, Kushal who was organising the meetup decided to have an quick intro so that we may know about each other. After intro I came to know some were college students, some were working and all of them were keen to contribute something and were passionate for leaning new things for which we were gathered there. Then he gave an introduction on Unittest module which was our topic of discussion for that day. After this Kushal told what we are actually going to do today and its benefits and how we can relate and impliment that in our work. Then he gave an example of unit test in which "cat" command was tested and we all tried it in our own laptops and it was a success to run that unit test. In between we have some snacks like cold drink and samosa . All of us enjoyed this refreshment. Then Kushal decided to give different Test cases to everyone rather than all working on the same problem so that it will be more beneficial as we all will learn more by this, as a new challange will be there for everyone. Although it was not easy to think a new problem for each of us but still Kushal ended up by assigning a problem  to everyone who were present there. Chandan and Praveen were helping him in this, all three of them were there to help us with our queries.

After we got the problem, we started writing unittest for the assigned query. I was assigned a problem in which I have to test can we create a loopback device and perform file system operation without losing the file. In between doubts and questions were coming from the participants which were answered by either of the three. The environment was like that we are working on a crucial project as everyone was writing their test cases and running them to get the desired output. I was also so indulged in my Unit test case  that I don't how the three hours went, I came to know its 9 when Kushal told lets finish it here, we will continue in next meetup. Then he told us to some basics things and asked us to give feedback about the meetup. Then all of us winded up and it was decided we will do the remaining part at our own place and the will push the code on github, if there will be some issue we can contact Kushal by droping a mail or on IRC.

(pics by @anweshasrk)