This year the annual Flock to Fedora conference moved online and renamed to Nest With Fedora. Even with the situation around COVID-19 and without the option to meet others in person, Nest was still an awesome conference with plenty of things to do. The conference was hosted on Hopin platform, which allowed organizers to provide conference wide presentations and the smaller sessions for other talks. There were also some social related activities, like booths or talking for a few minutes with random Fedoran. You could also invite anybody for a private talk. The Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team was there and gave quite a lot of talks.

7th August – First day of Nest

On the first day of the conference, the CPE Team had four sessions. Three of them talked about what new things we were working on and the last one was a fun session with a quiz, where you could have won some prizes.

What’s new in the land of release-monitoring.org

Time (UTC): 14:30

Speakers: Michal Konečný (mkonecny, zlopez)

Michal Konečný: 

This was my first talk at Nest and it wasn’t without issues. I started with the wizard theme that I’m using when writing blog posts about release-monitoring.org and there were few who didn’t know that a project like this exists in Fedora. I really missed my wizard hat, there was some accident in the laboratory and let’s just say, that the wizard hat is not really fireproof. I ordered a new one, but it didn’t arrive in time for Nest :-(.

I started with basic magic like what is release-monitoring.org and what it does. Then I shared some interesting statistics about release-monitoring.org (issues closed/opened, commit number, projects watched by Anitya etc.). I continued with what is new and what is in plan for the future. Sometimes around the talk about the new features in Anitya my laptop froze and I noticed that it’s stuck after talking for no less than a minute. I needed to restart the whole laptop and to prevent this in the future I found something to put under the laptop, so it’s not suffering so much from overheating.

I finished the rest of the talk without issue and there were around 20 people watching the presentation when we got to the questions. I answered a few of them and the time I had for the session was out. The feedback for the talk was positive and it looks like we have few more users using release-monitoring.org after Nest.

An Introduction to the FAS replacement

Time (UTC): 15:00

Speakers: 

• Aurélien Bompard (abompard)
• Stephen Coady (scoady)
• Christian Heimes

Aurélien Bompard: 

FAS is finally being replaced by a more modern, secure and collaborative system that is standards-based and leverages the great work done on FreeIPA. We’ve been working on it since the beginning of the year and we are happy to show you what we’ve built, what you can expect from the new user-facing portal, from the API, and what the general differences are.

Stephen Coady:

This was my first time speaking at a conference and I think I picked a really good one to start with. First of all the fact it was virtual made it very relaxed but also the crowd was very engaged and welcoming. From what I have heard this is the same regardless of whether it is Nest or Flock. I delivered a talk about the new Fedora/CentOS AAA solution I have been working on for the past 8 months. I think it went well and there seemed to be a lot of interest both during and after as I was contacted by a few people with questions about ways they can get involved. I will definitely be submitting talks to Nest/Flock in the future.

Pagure, a year in review

Time (UTC): 15:00

Speakers: 

• Pierre-Yves Chibon (pingou)
• Neal Gompa

Pierre-Yves Chibon:

This talk presented some of the newest feature added to pagure this year, from branch-ACLs, to kanban boards, to git push over http(s), to picking the default branch in git when creating a project, we went through some of the most interesting new features and we concluded the discussion with some of the ideas we would like to work on next year. These include kerberos support for git push over http(s), retiring python2, fedmsg and repoSpanner support as well as a few changes for pagure over dist-git.

Fedora Pub Quiz hosted by CPE

Time (UTC): 16:00

Speakers:

• Stefan Mattejiet
• Vipul Siddharth (siddharthvipul1)
• Aoife Moloney (amoloney)
• Pierre-Yves Chibon (pingou)

About:

As part of the social track at Nest this year, the CPE team hosted a pub quiz for nest attendees to join and test their Fedora knowledge. The platform used was kahoot!. Which seemed to work really well as participants were able to follow a URL to the game entry, create their player name and follow along on the host main screen and answer the questions on theirs. Some of the questions included some fun stats, important announcements and general trivia around the Fedora Project and CPE.

CentOS Stream: The Shared Space

Time (UTC): 18:30

Speakers: Brian Stinson (bstinson)

Brian Stinson:

CentOS Stream is meant to be a shared space for developing the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In this talk we covered a little bit more about what that means, and how we plan to participate in upstream-first development alongside Fedora and RHEL. 

8th August – Second day of Nest

On the second day of the conference the CPE Team also had 4 sessions. One of them reviewed the last year of the CPE and part of it was Q&A. Another was a fun session of bingo hosted by our team. And the other two talked about the work done by our team.

CPE Year in Review and leadership Q&A

Time (UTC): 15:00

Speakers:

• Ant Carroll
• Aoife Moloney (amoloney)
• Pierre-Yves Chibon (pingou)
• Leigh Griffin (lgriffin)

Leigh Griffin: 

I think this talk became a representation of the multiple other superb talks you are seeing and reading about in this blog and I was very proud as the Manager of the team to put this together on the team’s behalf. This was a really engaging session where the chat was buzzing for the entire duration of it. We gave a very strong overview of the current state of the team, the technical tasks that we have taken on and accomplished and set some foundations for future conversations about how we can best serve the community. The overall comments and reactions were very positive for the team and we had 63 people at our session which I was very happy to see. 

CentOS CI Infra: common ground

Time (UTC): 18:00

Speakers:

• David Kirwan (saffronique)
• Vipul Siddharth (siddharthvipul1)

Vipul Siddharth:

The idea of this talk was to showcase our efforts in the CI Infrastructure space and how we work with Fedora to provide a good CI infra experience. We presented an overview of our workflow, how we create (what we provide to tenants) and then we moved to question answers. CentOS CI Infra provides the means to run multiple different kinds of workloads eg. baremetal, VMs and containers.

Fedora Bingo hosted by CPE

Time (UTC): 18:00

Speakers:

• Stefan Mattejiet
• Vipul Siddharth (siddharthvipul)
• Aoife Moloney (amoloney)
• Pierre-Yves Chibon (pingou)

About:

This event took some of the questions from the Fedora pub quiz from the Friday event and was a game of luck! Players joined the session and were asked to follow a URL where they were generated a bingo card.
At randoms questions were shared and answers were to be marked off the card. The first person to complete the card won the biggest award

MBBox – Module Building in a Box

Time (UTC): 18:30

Speakers: Michal Konečný (mkonecny, zlopez)

Michal Konečný: 

This talk was about the initiative I was part of from April to June. The goal of this initiative was to port MBBox python script to Kubernetes operator. I was surprised how people were interested in this project and the number of questions they had. At first I was not sure that this could be an interesting topic for anyone, but obviously there are few people interested in having module building production ready deployment available. I got a very good feedback during this talk and a few very good ideas about what could be done in the future.

9th August – Last day of Nest

On the last day of the conference the CPE Team had 3 sessions. One of them talked about resilience and how to manage stress in these difficult times. Other two talked about initiatives our team has worked on.

Resilience: How to help ourselves & each other

Time (UTC): 12:30

Speakers: Sarah Finn (sfinn)

Sarah Finn:

I was delighted to kick off the last day of Nest exploring Resilience. The opening intro invited the attendees to use this time to reflect on steps they could take to help build their own resilience. 

I spoke about my own experience on my resilience journey and how important it is to build on our resilience to take into our personal and professional lives. We explored the ever changing uncertain world we experience today and how if we don’t spend time taking care of our mental and physical wellbeing we are at a high risk of burnout. We explored what burnout might look like for some people – how it usually starts with sleep problems and can quickly spiral from there. We flagged that if we are not taking care of ourselves, it’s normal to experience burnout. 

We started to explore how we prevent or recover from burnout by giving time and effort to travel the sometimes uncomfortable road to prioritizing positive changes. We looked at characteristics and mindset of resilient people – how they take accountability around their own behavior and happiness, they view change as an opportunity , they value their contribution & those of others, set realistic goals , view challenges and disagreements in a more positive light, they are aware of their emotions, they don’t control them, they reflect on them to find the real reason why they feel as they do, they ask for help – accept their own strengths and weaknesses. 

We looked at the 4 key components to help build your resilience by building your connections, foster wellness, embrace healthy thoughts & find purpose. We also discussed some practical tips like accepting some days will be bad days, not to overthink it, rest and recharge for the next day, set a shut off time & stick to it, so you are fresh, rested for the next day, to stop striving for perfection and knowing that you are enough. We concluded the session with an open question around what positive steps will you take going forward to support yourself and others? 

rpmautospec: goal, design and scope

Time (UTC): 14:00

Speakers:

• Nils Philippsen (nphilipp)
• Pierre-Yves Chibon (pingou)

Link to slides: https://nphilipp.fedorapeople.org/nest2020-rpmautospec-slides/

Nils Philippsen: We presented the prototype worked on during Q1, the different approaches we considered, which one we picked and why, how easy it is to use (or to opt out) and what’s left to do (other than a placet from on high) before we can make it available in production. Even though I had the feeling of losing the plot a little at some points (some time passed since we actively worked on it and not enough hours in a day to practice in front of a mirror), the talk was received well and we had a fruitful Q&A session afterwards.

Home is where your servers are: Fedora datacenter move 2020

Time (UTC): 19:00

Speakers:

• Stephen Smoogen (smooge)
• Kevin Fenzi (nirik)

Kevin Fenzi:

Our talk on the datacenter move of 2020 went well, but was only a 25min slot! We went over things pretty quickly and took a few questions. It was a really big undertaking, but overall I think it went pretty well due to all the planning and it’s great for it to be over now. 🙂 

Epilogue

As you can see we had plenty of fun at the Nest and we will for sure be at the conference next year be it in person or online. Looking forward to seeing you next year!