I had a wonderful opportunity to go to Fedora’s annual contributor summit, Flock to Fedora in Budapest, Hungary. This is me penning down my takeaway from a week full of learning!

From all the talks I attended, here are a few that stood out the most to me:

  1. State of Fedora: The talk gave me a good insight about Fedora’s current state and rough outline of how the path is paved for the upcoming year. One thing that I was really surprised to know was just how transparent the entire showcase was.
  2. All things containers: a deep dive into untold features of Podman, Buildah and Skopeo This was a very interesting talk and involving talk for me. The way Valentin explained and introduced exciting feature for each was brilliant. I also got to know later that my fellow GSoCer Divyansh was working on one of them during his internship!
  3. Communishift: A OpenShift cluster for Fedora community managed applications I have been working during my internship to deploy our app to OpenShift in the long run. It was exciting to see the developers working on it explain the roadmap for the platform.
  4. Badges Hackfest: I was part of the user testing session of the badges hackfest. It was super fun to see the other side of the spectrum, of how users interpret and interact with what we build.
  5. Community Platform Engineering Hackfest: Me and my mentor, Justin, sat through the hackfest getting each other up to speed with the projects progress and working on a last bug that was keeping us from deploying the application locally to minishift. We also got to play around with the openshift instance. I also picked up a handful of neat tricks while working along with Justin.
  6. Summer Coding Showcase: Last but certainly not the least, the highlight of Flock was the Summer Coding showcase. I got to know what the other interns has been working on and got to share my own progress! The mentor panel this year was a really helpful session that gave me lot of insights and so many varied perspectives for the same question.

Apart from the talks, the conference outshone when it came to meeting mind-blowing developers. I got to know the most about Fedora and Red Hat through those interactions and it was a really pleasant experience. It was also super amazing to finally meet all the people I had been interacting with over the course of the internship in real life.

My advice for any future Flock attendee would be to always make time to talk to people at Flock. Even I have a hard time interacting but the people are extremely nice and you get to learn a lot through those small interactions and end up making friends for a life time.

Definitely taking back a tonne of memories, loads of pictures, and plethora of learning from this one week of experience.