I have been a part of Fedora community for last 4 releases and have seen a lot of changes. Among things that have not been changed, Fedora Release Party in Bangalore is one of them.

Thanks to a bunch of very active contributors and an ambassador & mentor (Sumantro Mukherjee), it has now become a custom to celebrate Fedora Release Party in  Bangalore.

Different venues, different topics, different cakes but similar faces joining us and sharing their experiences in Fedora community to encourage new contributors to continue their noble work, and users to start contributing. The success story of a student who got an internship in a big company then became an employee always boosts the energy of college students.

Last RP, we tried to on-board few students for QA contributions and this time they came with a lot of reports. They are now active contributors and they introduced themselves to others. I invited my juniors to be a part of RP so that we can help them see the benefits of Open Source contributions.

We started with latest Fedora features followed by some success stories and introductions.

Then we cut the cake. After cake, we discussed few interesting things going around. Sumantro talked about Fedora Modularity and explained how this can solve the problem of sacrificing stability over bleeding edge features.

I briefly explained ‘How Fedora uses ansible and how they can use ansible in their daily life/work’

Lunch had arrived and I am sure everyone was waiting to grab something. We were having our lunch when few of my juniors asked how scalable is Ansible. We got an Idea! With public’s demand, Saurabh Bhadwar explained how performance engineering team uses Fedora and Ansible to do their stuff.

After leaving everyone amazed, Saurabh waived the party. Everyone was discussing ‘How they started with their contribution’, ‘Challenges faced’ etc. Meanwhile, my juniors, who were not contributors (yet) were installing Fedora in their laptops. Akshat Ahuja managed the installation booth amazingly. We also showed Fedora on my Raspberry Pi.

We thought of talking to people who started their Fedora contribution since the last release.

Here is the shorter version of their interview (not really, just normal conversation).

1. Akshat Ahuja

I was always interested in changing my OS and wanted power to customise OS according to me , but my journey in fedora started when I met Vipul Siddharth and Prakash Mishra who introduced me to Fedora and I fell in love with the way Linux and Fedora works and was very much interested in FOSS.

2. Buvanesh Sivasubramaniyam

My first contribution was in f24 release cycle by participation in a test day with Sumantro and Vipul. But I started with localization  contribution since last release. Right now, I am willing to contribute to Fedora Infra.

3. Srijita Mukherjee

It has just been a year I am contributing to Open-Source, more precisely to Fedora and mostly to package testing.Have actively taken part in Test Days(like i18n, Gnome, Upgrade Test days and few more). It was Sumantro, who has explained me the past and future of Open-Source and hence I am here at Red Hat working as a Technical Writer for gluster. But that does not stop me contributing to other projects. Gluster upstream docs is another place where I contribute. Will definitely do more in coming days.

4. Manik Chugh

Recently, I started my contribution journey with Fedora design team and Kanika has been guiding me in this. Till date, journey has been great and I wish to get involved in community as much as possible.

And in the end, here are few more pictures from the party