This year the annual Flock to Fedora conference was online again and again it was known as 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 smaller sessions for other talks. There were also some social related activities, like booths or meeting others in Work Adventure. You could also invite anybody for a private talk. The Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team was there and gave quite a lot of talks.

4th August – First day of Nest

On the first day of the conference, the folks from CPE Team were part of six sessions. These sessions were really wide in the audience, from beginner’s experience in Fedora from Newbies Perspective to Fedora ELN (yes, CPE Team has fingers in it too). As you can see, there were plenty of sessions to visit to see the CPE Team on Thursday.

Meet Your FESCo

Time (UTC): 14:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bfmDrDJpfo

Speakers: 

  • Kevin Fenzi (CPE) (nirik, kevin)
  • Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (mizdebsk)
  • Miro Hrončok
  • David Cantrell
  • Fabio Valentini
  • Stephen Gallagher (CPE) (sgallagher)
  • Neal Gompa (ngompa, Conan Kudo)
  • Benjamin Beasley
  • Major Hayden

Kevin Fenzi:

We had 6 of the 9 FESCo members in attendance, and had a broad range of questions from the folks. I’d encourage everyone to listen to the replay and questions and answers. 🙂

Fedora from Newbies Perspective

Time (UTC): 14:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IyjL0zHdFA

Speakers: 

  • Anton Medvedev (CPE) (amedvede)
  • Adam Piasecki (CPE)
  • James Richardson (CPE) (jrichardson)

James Richardson:

I am the prototypical “second career” Fedora user. In actuality, this is probably more like my 5th career, but who’s counting? For my entire computing life until 2017, I was made to be unaware of other operating systems besides Windows due to the machines I used. In 2017 I made the decision to go back to university to obtain my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Forensics and Security, which had me working with more Linux-based OS’s. Simultaneously, I was learning software development, and the two seemed to make sense together.

Release Monitoring in 2022

Time (UTC): 15:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T33eXlEv9Z0

Speakers: 

  • Michal Konečný (CPE) (mkonecny, zlopez)

Michal Konečný: 

This session was a summary of what happened in the world of release-monitoring.org till the last Nest. I was talking with my pointy hat on my head and was surprised to see around 50 people joining the session. There were plenty of questions as well + few interesting ideas I will look into. It seems that this monitoring service is used by plenty of people, which is great!

What’s up with CPE?

Time (UTC): 16:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE84YiksLyg

Speakers: 

  • Julia Bley (CPE) (jbley)
  • Ellen O’Carrol (CPE) (eocarrol)

Julia Bley & Ellen O’Carroll:

As the Community Platform Engineering Team (CPE) we are dedicated to the Fedora and the CentOS Stream projects. We are helping the communities with – but not limited to – managing releases, beneficial initiatives and maintenance. The newest addition to the CPE Team is the Community Design Team (CDT) which is the driver for e.g. mascots like Colúr and the Fedora wallpapers. Our 39 global team members speak at least 14 languages and closed 1796 tickets since the last Nest in 2021. Want to find out more? Look at the recording.

If you want to get involved and collaborate with us, come and work with us on the Fedora Badges  

Logo Design: Creation of the Nest/Flock/Hatch logos and Colúr!

Time (UTC): 19:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WujB-CLiUe8

Speakers: 

  • Jess Chitas (CPE)
  • Marie Nordin

Jess Chitas: 

Link to presentation: Nest – Logo Design Presentation.pdf

Our presentation was about the creation of the Nest, Flock and Hatch logos and also our new Fedora mascot, Colúr! We also talked about logo design and how to create the perfect logotype as well which was really cool. It was my first ever Nest presentation so I was quite nervous but it was super fun during the presentation! 

You can read the blog post regarding the logos and Colúr as well!

Fedora ELN: Putting the RHELish on the Beefy Miracle

Time (UTC): 19:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVtwKlsqMAI

Speakers: 

  • Stephen Gallagher (CPE) (sgallagher)

5th August – Second day of Nest

On the second day of the conference the CPE Team took part in 4 sessions. CPE Team members were part of three bigger sessions and an awesome fun quiz.

Mindshare, What We do and Why

Time (UTC): 14:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8tIILZ34uo

Speakers:

  • Marie Nordin
  • Madeline Peck
  • David Duncan
  • Alberto Rodriguez S.
  • Máirín Duffy
  • Nick Bebout
  • Onuralp Sezer
  • Petr Bokoč (CPE) (pbokoc)
  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul)

Vipul Siddharth:

In this session, we had an agenda to promote what Mindshare is and how we work. We also answered questions from the Audience.

Fedora Council Townhall

Time (UTC): 15:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD5yq9Kj3Ew

Speakers:

  • Tom Callaway
  • Sumantro Mukherjee
  • David Cantrell
  • Matthew Miller
  • Marie Nordin
  • Ben Cotton
  • Mariana Balla
  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul)
  • Alberto Rodriguez S.
  • Akashdeep Dhar (CPE) (akdhar, t0xic0der)

Pub Quiz

Time (UTC): 16:30

Speakers:

  • Aoife Moloney (CPE) (amoloney)
  • Marie Nordin

Packaging for Beginners

Time (UTC): 18:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLf4b03PHxM

Speakers: 

  • Carl George (CPE) (carlwgeorge)
  • Troy Dawson (CPE) (tdawson)
  • Nils Phillipsen (CPE) (nils)

Carl George: Unfortunately this workshop was plagued by connectivity issues on my end.  I was not connecting from my normal location.  My internet speed was much slower which led to the conference platform misbehaving.  I was disconnected several times and had to switch to audio only.  I think in the future I’ll avoid doing workshops virtually.  They work much better in person.

6th August – Last day of Nest

On the last day of the conference the CPE Team participated in 5 sessions and they were pretty diverse. From gaming oriented session to EPEL. We even had a mini barcamp for the Fedora Infrastructure & Releng team.

Fedora Workstation’s State of Gaming

Time (UTC): 14:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9aLwjhYSR0

Speakers: 

  • Akashdeep Dhar (CPE) (akdhar, t0xic0der)
  • Onuralp Sezer

Fedora Infrastructure & Releng Mini Barcamp

Time (UTC): 14:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I07ztsAg80c

Speakers:

  • Kevin Fenzi (CPE) (nirik, kevin)
  • Mark O’Brien (CPE) (mobrian)
  • Michal Konečný (CPE) (mkonecny, zlopez)

Kevin Fenzi:

We organized this as a ‘barcamp’ type session. That is, we had people enter topics they wanted to discuss and then everyone present voted on talks they wanted to attend and we did them in the order of votes. We had a break in the middle and almost managed to finish on time!

Our hackmd document captured all the topics and some notes from them: Infra and Releng mini barcamp at nest 2022

Discussion was all over the place. The most interesting one for me was talking about how we could be more proactive instead of reactive to requests/needs of our users and thinking ahead many years what infrastructure might look like then.

Mark O’Brien:

The future of Fedora infrastructure was discussed with a wider audience than usual and it was great to get ideas and feedback from the community about how they wish to see things going forward. Hopefully we can use the ideas discussed to improve Fedora infrastructure in the medium to long term.

Michal Konečný:

This was a good session, we had a good discussion about interesting topics with people from the community. We took plenty of notes. The most discussed item was Fedora Infra in 5 years, where community members had plenty to say. It was a time well spent.

5 lessons learned from 5 years of Fedora D.E.I. events

Time (UTC): 15:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBgiuKh5nsk

Speakers:

  • Vipul Siddharth (CPE) (siddharthvipul1)
  • Justin Flory

Vipul Siddharth:

The Fedora DEI Team (originally, Diversity Team) was formed in 2015, following the appointment of Fedora’s first Diversity Advisor.The DEI team was formed up around the Diversity Advisor and helping them with their work, although later the work expanded to more broadly focus on DEI across the Fedora Community. Today, we still have a DEI Advisor who serves on the Council, but we are also a community of people who care about diversity, equity, and inclusion in Fedora. 

The DEI Team has a few areas of focus, but one of the largest areas is events! We love events and we have helped influence many of them in Fedora over the last seven years. In this talk, we shared 5 learnings from all the events we have organized so far and the common thread in them.

Fedora on Steam Deck

Time (UTC): 16:00

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU0wi8-IxqQ

Speakers:

  • Michal Konečný (CPE) (mkonecny, zlopez)

Michal Konečný: 

In this session I showed what installing and running Fedora on Steam Deck looks like. I summarized what works and what not, how the experience was and answered questions people have in the chat. The session was fun and it seemed that people were enjoying the talk.

State of EPEL

Time (UTC): 19:30

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVuc_nRsZiY

Speakers:

  • Troy Dawson (CPE) (tdawson)

Troy Dawson:

I gave an overview of the State of EPEL. I gave an overview of the past year, and what is currently planned for the future. Lots of graphs, information as well as a good Question and Answer session.

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!