Miroslav Suchý

Flock 2016 Report

I spent previous week in Kraków at Flock. It is a conference of Fedora developers and users. I really liked it - hmm this is not enough - It was awesome!

For me the best part was those social events. Every single event there was prepared some social event and I met a lots of people I never met before and learn about interesting things they are doing. I was at FUDcon in Zürich, Flock in Prague, but Kraków done really best job so far. And the town is sooo beautiful. I have to admit that I had a lot of prejudice about Poland and Polish cities, but I was really overhelmed. And I do plan to return there with my family for some holidays.

Probably the best talk for me was by Radosław Krowiak about Akademia Programowania. It is a company in Poland and they are trying to learn programming 5+ years old kids. Exactly the same what I am doing in Czech! The presentation itself was nothing new to me, but the follow up discussion in lobby was very informative. For example I was surprised that they are successful with programming in pairs.

The most surprising talk for me was "I contributed! but, what now?" by Bee Padalkar. She done some data mining and shown us that we are loosing a lots of people as contributors. That means they join, do some contributions, but within 3 months they are gone. Most of them. We - the senior contributors - should definitely do better to mentor the newcomers. I took this talk very personally and I will try to focus on this area in near future.

"Fedora's MirrorManager - now and the future" by Adrian Reber. I learn some background of MirrorManager. I was taken by surprise that in background there is lots of crawler which pro-actively monitor health of the mirrors.

Definitely the most important talk was "Modularity: Why, where we are, and how to get involved", because that may be the future of Fedora. Langdon was able to do (live) demo of modules installation. The idea is that you will have some core modules (think about it as stripped down Cloud/Server/Workstation spin) and you will install modules. Modules are group of packages which works together. Something like comps, but each of them has own repository and there is some more logic behind. This will allow you to have e.g. newest Fedora and some old stable httpd. Or vice versa - old Fedora (or maybe RHEL in future) and newest PHP.

On Thursday I attended "Fedora Badges Workshop". I expected that I will just watch others as I have no talent for drawing and painting. But ... at the end I draw a brand new badge!

And yes - I had two talk. One was together with Clime about state of Copr (slides and the other was about Fedora Sponsors (slides. We had very nice discussion there and there was great ideas how to improve the process. You can follow up it on devel mailing list.

Was there some drawback? Unfortunaly yes. I participated in one morning run, which Vít arranged and I ran bare foot and ripped off one nail.