Fedora Hatch Cork was a small, local one day mini-conference. Fedora Project contributors were welcome to attend, learn about the project and connect with other contributors. There were several Fedora-related sessions, followed by a social activity in the evening. The event was held in the Red Hat office in Cork which was recently renovated. 

The day opened with an icebreaker event called “Faces”. Attendees paired up with somebody nearby and swapped sheets of paper to draw a feature of the person they swapped with, starting with the eyes. It was a great exercise to meet new people at the event. It also allowed me to absolutely butcher some peoples’ great drawings!

History of Fedora

Ant Carroll and Ellen O’Carroll kicked off the talks. They gave attendees an introduction to Red Hat, as well as the Community Platform Engineering team. This included a history lesson on Fedora with some questions for the audience where people could win prizes!

Image Builder Team

Next up we had a talk from Tom Gundersen and Ondřej Budai from the Image Builder team. They told us about the work they were doing building operating system images, and the different distros, footprints and architectures that need to be supported. The slides, along with a demo are available on HackMD!

Fedora Logo Design

Jess Chitas was up next. She told us about her work around logo design with Fedora. It was interesting to see the creative process leading up to the final designs and showed us how the Hatch logo and mascot came to be!

Infrastructure and Release Engineering Team

Mark O’Brien from the Infrastructure and Release Engineering team gave us an overview of the infrastructure that makes Fedora and CentOS work. He told us of the mix of bare metal, virtual machines, AWS, and Openshift applications as well as the tools used to help keep everything up and running. We also learned a lot about the different initiatives that run in the Community Platform Engineering team and how they are scoped out and run!

Fedora Account System Project

Aoife Moloney and Mark O’Brien then gave the final talk of the day to talk about the Fedora Account System replacement project. We learned about all of the difficulties running a project with a mix of community and a main team and the importance of communication to community mailing lists. 

Throughout the day there was a whiteboard that had a list of everyone’s favourite animals, food, activities and birthdays to see what people had in common. It turns out that Fedora contributors absolutely love dogs and… pizza!

The Social

Which brings us to the social event! We went to Deep South for a pub quiz with Fedora related questions and all got some great pizza! We ended the day with a trip to Barcadia, where the group got to play some board and arcade games!

The event was a great learning experience to gain visibility on many different pieces of the Fedora Project. I had a lot of fun being able to meet different people from around the company. Most importantly, it was a fun day out! Check out a video recap of Fedora Hatch Cork on Fedora’s YouTube Channel.