This was the first occurrence of the conference for me to attend. Its an annual Fedora Community gathering, which happens in a new city of Europe every year. This time it was in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, last year it was hosted in Dresden. Dates for the same were: 8th Aug through 11th Aug 2019. Also I got an opportunity to present there on my proposal: “Getting Started with Fedora QA”.

Day 1 Started with a Keynote by Mathew Miller (mattdm). In here he spoke about where we as a community are and where we need to go further. It was a knowledgeable discussion for a first timer like me who was always looking out for the Vision and Mission of Fedora community. There are people who are with Fedora since its first release and you get to meet them here at the annual gathering.

I collaborated with Geoffrey Marr, my co-presenter for a few last moment modifications in the slides. We decided to walk down to level 0 for a calm discussion as it was a bit loud and crowded as all sessions were planned on Level1.

I could see many people had enrolled for our session in the sched app and I was happy to know that there are people who are curious to know how QE can be performed for Fedora. People from all experience levels were present and in fact I could use some experience from the audience. Somehow our session turned out to be more of a discussion where a bunch of people shared their blockers or issues with going ahead with their QE.

Candies exchange was a small event planned in the evening at 20:00 where people bring popular candies, in good amount, from their respective countries, explain the speciality of it. At the end people can collect whichever they like, have them and enjoy the evening.

Groups were formed and people decided for themselves where they wanted to go for the evening hangout on the Day 1. We were 7 people who decided to hangout at the Atmosphere Klub near the V.Kerulet and left at around 9:00 pm by walk.

Day 2 started with a keynote by Denise Dumas, Vice President, Operating System Platform, Red Hat. She spoke on “Fedora, Red Hat and IBM”. I woke up late, 20 minutes before the first session as I went to bed late last night and had walked for around 11 kms the day before.

1 interesting session was “State of Fedora Security” by @huzaifas (Huzaifa Sidhpurwala). He addressed a few security breaches in the Open Source World and how those can affect Fedora and how they can be tackled. He described a few Open Source tools to avoid these security breaches. Moderate vulnerable packages will be removed during next release of the package in 6 weeks, this was approved by FesCo. There was also a plan to create a Fedora Security Dashboard where students from Outreachy and GSoC could be hired and developed the app. Google Chromium is the tool by Google which scans the commits for security vulnerabilities. What are the other Open Source options was an open question.

“Silverblue: On the way to the Future of Fedora Workstation” was a session by Jiri Eischmann and Tomas Popela. There is currently no GUI installer for containers. No localisation, no caching when doing builds locally, too few applications available, no support for delta updates, no policy set for long term support are some of the current issues of Fedora Flatpaks.

“Fedora for living in the Container World.”

Mathew Miller, Flock 2019

A Cruise dinner was planned between 18:00 to 20:00 for all the speakers and attendees for the Day 2 evening and everyone started walking to the cruise at around 17:30 pm. It was a 3 storeyed boat with drinks and food already loaded/arranged, no vegetarian options for me though except the red sauce pasta, the life saviour.

Day 3 started with Interns showcasing their projects and their respective takeaways from what they’ve been working on. Few sessions were: Fedora Gooey Karma, Fedora Happiness Packets, et cetera.

Mentors Panel was a casual discussion about the experience from last year, questions the interns had if any. Stephen Gallagher, Laura Abott (outreachy), Bhagyashree Padalkar, Clement Verna and Valentin Ruthberg were few from the panel. Experiences of working remotely, how the projects for interns are decided, how to get jobs in Open Source, et cetera were the few questions asked-addressed.

Later I’ve attended the Fedora Badges Workshop by Marie Nordin in the Panorama room. There was another instance of this one post lunch but I had a different session added to my schedule already. Agenda for this session included: 5 things we want to see from Dev, Ticket Triage, Update style guide, Onboarding process, Identify designs that are incorrect, How to incorporate badges into Fedora workflows, Development roadmap.

In the second half of the day, I attended a 2 hour Workshop on “Fedora Internationalization CI and Test Cases” by @pravins and Jens Petersen. Noto variable fonts, langpacks-core and bus are the i18n changes in Fedora 31.

“Diversity & Inclusion Hackfest” was the last session for the day. Accomplishments in the past year, plans for upcoming years, enhanced internal team process, et cetera were discussed in this one. 10 Fedora Women’s Days were organised in last 1 year, the event is actually not more than 3 years old. Community Moderation Guide is something that can be created for a crisper event guideline. Coffee with Friends is an initiative that can be organised more frequently.

Everyone gathered for a group photo behind the Hotel, at a small open area at around 5:20 pm. 5:40 pm was the time for buses to arrive which would take us for the Budapest site seeing. The Indian group gathered in a single bus together and the tour started from the Hungarian Parliament. Huge space it was and there were 3 parliament buildings built to choose the best from. There is a tram train (No. 2) you can take to reach here. Later we visited the Opera House, the Ronald Reagan square, Ruin bars, the Turkish Synagogue, et cetera.

“Troll your FeSCo” was 1 of the sessions on the 4th Day, last day of the conference. FeSCo stands for Fedora Security Council. “When a change is approved, do we actually ensure the change is implemented? – Huzaifa”, “Why do we need a change process? – Fedorova”, “There are things which FeSCo is not responsible for but Council is”, “Change is the ultimate project organisation tool and it’s inevitable”, “One should go to Council if someone wants to pursue a FreeBSD kernel”, “Should a change be discussed on the fedora-level mailing list and then be brought to FeSCo?”, et cetera were the things discussed in here.

Lastly people gathered for the Wrap up / session report out in room Helia.