This was my first time at Flock to Fedora, and it was a blast! The conference took place from August 8th to August 11th in the astonishing city of Budapest.
It is very convenient to host the conference at the same place where people are accommodated. The whole infrastructure and conference organization was top-notch. Nice social events and great comfort during the talks/workshops.
At the very beginning, it was pleasant to watch Matthew Miller’s “The State of Fedora”, especially the emphasis on Silverblue being “the future of Fedora Workstation”, and the overview of all the other teams building fantastic things on top of Fedora. The “Facebook Loves Fedora” talk was definitely the one we talked the most about during the breaks. Long story short, Facebook’s IT is supporting Fedora Workstations for its employees and they have a quite appealing story of their adoption. All recorded Flock talks are planned to be published in the Fedora Project YouTube channel, so I encourage you to watch specifically this quick one (25 minutes) once it is out.
Debarshi Ray’s “Toolbox” talk was well received by the audience, and the post-talk corridor convo was productive. People seemed curious and optimistic about the solutions we have for “making their workflow-breakage less painful”. 🙂 Unfortunately Rishi’s talk was scheduled at the same time slot as Christian Schaller’s “Fedora Workstation update and roadmap”. It is great having talks recorded for this very reason.
“Fedora IoT” by Peter Robinson was a nice surprise. Peter brought an Exxon Mobil representative to talk about their use and challenges while using Fedora technologies in IoT devices. These folks have a very interesting set of problems to solve, and I would love FOSS to be the go-to option in this market (any market, really!). I am personally interested in home/domestic automation with open hardware tech, and I can see how the “Fedora IoT” efforts can have a beneficial impact on the enterprise but also in STEM education.
To start the second day, Denise Dumas presented a very reassuring keynote talk on “Red Hat + IBM” and how that impacts the Fedora project. Once again, it was very satisfying to hear “Fedora is RHEL’s upstream” being emphasized. The Red Hat commitment to upstream communities is something we hear a lot internally, but I feel we rarely express that to the outside world (to the point that a significant amount of people eventually question that).
My colleagues Jiri Eischmann and Tomas Popela had a talk on Silverblue. It gathered an interested audience that engaged in Q&A with us afterwards. Some of the questions were positive feedback that we should take, and some others were useful questions that enabled us to clarify some common misunderstandings and lack of knowledge about Silverblue, ostree, containers, Flatpak, and all things. 🙂
At the end of the day I presented a “Fedora Flatpaks” talk. You can watch its recording below.
After the talk, I was approached by a couple of packagers interested in converting their RPMed apps into Flatpaks. Win-Win!
The river cruise and dinner in the Danube is now history! Check out all the pics https://photos.app.goo.gl/rz1VZqdw6MKeasuc8
I am looking forward to seeing you all again in DevConf.CZ and/or Flock to Fedora 2020.