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 :)

                                 

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.