Day One - CentOS Connect 2025

The first day of my presence at CentOS Connect 2025 began as early as 0600am Central European Time on 30th January 2025. As the first half of that day mostly consisted of some meetups from Hyperscale SIG, Alternative Images SIG, AlmaLinux Elevate and the OKD team, I decided that I would try to make it to the venue by 1100am Central European Time. I wanted to help with the organizational efforts of CentOS Connect 2025 and represent the Fedora Project community at the event venue. Sumantro Mukherjee and I headed down at around 0730am Central European Time for breakfast where we met with Greg Sutcliffe and Luis Bazan. Amidst all the wisecracking about Greg's pink-coloured water bottle, Justin W. Flory and Bhagyashree Padalkar joined us at the dining place to join Greg on their way to CHAOSScon EU 2025 at Bedford Hotels & Congress Centre.

After a brief introduction with Bhagyashree before their departure, I realized that Greg had left his pink-coloured water bottle and sprinted outside to catch up with Greg who headed inside at the same time with the same realization. With the handover complete, I discussed the plans to head to the CentOS Connect 2025 event venue with Sumantro and Luis where Luis decided to head away in advance while the both of us decided to delay our departure by at least 0930am Central European Time. The shop that we were planning to visit during the first half of the day named Ichiban was opening at around 1000am Central European Time and was on the way between the event venue at DoubleTree by Hilton Brussels City and our hotel, Moxy Brussels City Center. We soon departed on bus number #71 bound for De Brouckère from a nearby bus stop and got off one stop before the designated point.

The rain that morning was a lot worse than the one that Sumantro and I experienced the previous night. While we previously were considering heading to the event venue on foot, we quickly decided to use a bus instead. On our way from the destination stop to the Ichiban store, we also passed through the Hotel Marivaux which we stayed at during my first trip to FOSDEM in 2023. We swiftly made it to the Ichiban store where Sumantro explored some Goku figurines from the Dragon Ball Z (1989) anime and I was finally able to find some Manga books in English. As the selection did not match my expectations, Sumantro and I decided to head out after purchasing a couple of imported merchandise from Japan like quaint-themed Fanta drinks and some Anime themed Sakuma Drops from the popular Naruto (2007) anime and acclaimed Ansatsu Kyoushitsu (2015) anime.

Some more walking through towards the event venue and we soon found ourselves around the DoubleTree by Hilton Brussels City hotel where CentOS Connect 2025 was organized. This was also the place that I was staying in to attend the FOSDEM fringe events in 2024 so I felt this sense of familiarity with the place. What helped with the familiarity more was the sight of Carl W. George and Dorka Volavkova at the CentOS Connect 2025 reception desk at around 1030am Central European Time. For Carl - going as far as hugging me when I was super soaked from rain was "no big deal" and it was indeed great meeting him after a long time. Sumantro and I got ourselves the event badges along with CentOS Project themed tee shirts while we were at the desk. While we were at the desk, I noticed the SyncStar postcards that I worked to design and Dorka helped with printing from Brno.

I was grateful that Dorka managed to get these resources printed when these were turned in late to her because of the delays due to the confusion around the availability of Fedora Project themed USB flash drives for giveaways. SyncStar is a service that I developed by taking inspiration from an existing but unmaintained tool called Fedorator to help with creating bootable media at conference kiosks. Although there was this one thing that I was bummed about and that was the fact the CentOS Project-themed USB flash drives that were being given away were manually flashed with the recently released CentOS Stream 10 when SyncStar could have easily been of help with making the process convenient. After all, SyncStar was nothing but a fancy wrapper around GNU DD with asynchronous process queues written in Python and a responsive web interface written in ReactJS.

After leaving my coat to dry in the Chestnut Hall, I ran into Brian Exelbierd who also seemed to have arrived around the same time. It was great catching up with him after a long time and after leaving the conversation to Sumantro, I started working on setting up the YAML file to configure the SyncStar utility at the reception desk. Carl and I struggled briefly with the hotel WiFi as I wanted my laptop to execute the service headlessly and Carl's laptop to exhibit the web interface before deciding to use Cloudflare Tunnels for the purpose. The final deployment was configured to be served through the Cloudflare network on the hostname syncstar.gridhead.net which surprised Carl as he thought that the hostname was limited to the local network only. I caught up with Shaun McCance as well following the conversations around their move to GitLab with Fabian Arrotin.

Alongside the Fedora Project, the CentOS Project seemed to have also decided to move away from Pagure and hence, the assets on their current deployment of Package Sources and Project Collections had to be reliably exported over to GitLab. I maintained a project named Pagure Exporter for the Fedora Infrastructure team and I volunteered my support to help with the CentOS Project's migration from Pagure to GitLab. While my primary focus then was to introduce the support for Forgejo that the Fedora Council decided for the community to move over to - there was no need to reinvent the wheel with another project when the existing one could be extended. Once done with the exchange, I ran into Sherif Nagy and Neil Hanlon from the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and David Cantrell who represented the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee in the Fedora Council.

Purchasing an extra orange-flavoured Fanta soda can among other Japanese imported products at the Ichiban store earlier that morning was a wise thing to do as that ended up coming in handy when David mentioned his struggle with the caffeine intake since the morning. Saving him a trip downstairs for a purchase, I caught up in conversations with him when the both of us ran into Matthew Miller who had just arrived at the venue at around 0100pm Central European Time. After a small chat with him and Amy Marrich at the reception area, they left for a meeting with Shaun and Carl so I decided to help out with the event reception area with Dorka. She provided me with a swift and effective walkthrough of what had to be done and once I relocated my stuff to the cloakroom for event organizers and speakers, I started helping out with the event registrations there.

Dorka mentioned her plans to come to India for DevConf.IN in Pune - which was great because we were also planning on organizing a Fedora Project booth at the event. We were soon joined by Luis whose wisecracking kept things interesting as we were getting folks registered at the reception. Among some folks I helped register, I caught up with the likes of Alexandra Fedorova whom I was meeting after the previous Fedora Council F2F Meeting in 2024 and Fabio Valentini whom I was meeting for the first time. While getting David Fan and Jess Chitas registered, he mentioned liking my Instagram stories about my adventures through various anime stores in Brussels and planning on heading out together whenever after the event. At around 0130pm Central European Time, I decided to grab a Greek Bowl meal with chicken salad that was served for the lunch meal at the event venue.

Fabian arrived at CentOS Connect 2025 around the same time and I caught up with him, Frantisek Lachman and Alexandra in conversations who were present around the reception desk. At around 0200pm Central European Time, the presentations at the event began with an opening statement from Shaun - I started attending some talks while working on some recently noticed changes on the SyncStar project. The inexpensive USB flash drives used for the giveaways did not have unique hardware identifiers and hence, it was difficult to discern among multiple USB flash drives of the same type. Sumantro and I worked on brainstorming solutions (read as workarounds) with which we can retain the information about the USB flash drives plugged into the kiosk device, all while tuning into talks delivered by Troy Dawson, Dennis Gilmore and Joel Capitao in the Chestnut Hall.

At around 0500pm Central European Time, after spending some time brain storming and coming up with solutions that have some kind of compromises, Sumantro and I decided to call it a day and head back to the hotel. On our way out, we met up with Daniel Mellado and Mikel Olasagasti before we took a selfie with Alexandra, Brian and Dennis to close out the first day of CentOS Connect 2025. Coincidentally, we ran into Matthew and David at the dining area of the event venue so after waving David goodbye, the three of us "tailgated" our way out of the rear exit of the DoubleTree by Hilton Brussels City. On our way through the Rogier station to the train that we were supposed to catch for Port De Namur station, Sumantro and I discussed with Matthew about his tentative yet eager plans to visit India for the first time to represent the Fedora Project during DevConf.IN 2025.

We had a report of belongings being stolen from one of the Fedora Project community members during their travels so we took that as a learning to be extra careful about our surroundings whenever we were travelling in crowded trains like we did that time. After all, the last thing that you would want when you are travelling in a different country is for your important belongings like wallet, passport or smartphone to be stolen - I was worried about whoever was affected. After getting off at the Port De Namur station at around 0530pm Central European Time, we walked back to the Moxy Brussels City Center hotel. I connected with Matthew asynchronously after resting for a while and dropped a bag of Indian snacks in his hotel room about an hour later. As Sumantro was occupied with his work, I decided to head out alone to get a takeaway from the Belchicken outlet for dinner.

I heard back from Amita Sharma on the way back to the hotel who was working with Rajan Shah for last minute approval on the Fedora Project booth so I knew that I had to start working on the planning as soon as possible. I had to ensure that I was ready with the statistical budget estimate for travel and accommodation for the representatives from the Fedora Project required for pulling off such an event. Imagine leading the planning of yet another Fedora Project event all while representing the community at the FOSDEM 2025 fringe - Talk about being crazy enough to take this up! As audacious of a plan as it was, I was able to get together an estimated action and projected estimate for the required budget on a document after I was swiftly done with my dinner. All I had to do next was to present this to Justin on the next day before reverting to Rajan and Amita with a confirmation.

Looking back at the situation I was dealt with late in the evening at around 0830pm Central European Time when I was almost out of my juice - one half of me wanted to call it a day while the other half of me wanted to push through with the planning. In hindsight - I am glad that the other half took precedence because I like to think that exemplary actions in exigent moments like these end up creating a difference in free and open source software communities. After messaging Justin to reserve some time from his busy schedule and checking with Dorka to see if we could get some assistance from her end, I took inputs on the budget from Samyak Jain who was available until late. At around 1000pm Central European Time, I decided to head to bed and use the next day to make the best use of the stakeholders present in person at the CentOS Connect 2025 event to progress the planning.