Day One - Exploring Prague

As the Fedora Friends Social Event was called off, we had a bunch of freedom where we wanted to go and with whom on 08th June 2025. This also coincidentally happened to be a Sunday, thus closing a lot of doors and opening a whole lot more of them. I was not involved in any plans just yet by around 0700am Central European Summer Time, so I decided to join Michal Konecny's plan of visiting the Film Legends Experience Museum at Prague city center. A bunch of folks staying at Ibis Praha Mala Strana were still recovering from their visit at the Levels Place, so it only made sense that they might use the day for recuperating. As a result, it would not have been a wise idea to wait on someone - so I headed for breakfast after making some plans for the next day to meet up with Fabian Arrotin and Lenka Segura at around 0730am Central European Summer Time.

Brendan Conoboy and Kevin Fenzi had already left from the hotel, and as Lenka was travelling forward to attend DevConf.CZ 2025, she also planned on leaving in the afternoon. While she could not join us for the exploration trip, we did make a point to meet at a later point in time. Mentioning people heading over to the next event, Sumantro Mukherjee was also one of them, and I had to rush downstairs to return his glasses that he had left hurriedly in my room in the morning. That did allow me to meet up with Debarshi Ray and Stephen Gallagher for the last time, both of whom were on their way out of the hotel. Michal soon joined us for breakfast, and we decided to loop Greg Sutcliffe into the plan as well, as the previous plan could not be followed. After some anecdotes of Fabian and his family at CERN, we met up at the reception area after getting our equipment.

We were soon on our way out at around 1030am Central European Summer Time to meet up with Greg in front of Vienna House Andel Prague. From there, we took a tram to the station near our first stop, which was the Film Legends Experience Museum. I was reached out to by Yashwanth Rathakrishnan in the meanwhile, who wanted to join our exploration plan. It did take some time for him to reach us, but when he did, we were finally able to continue on our way. I had to assist Yashwanth with the entry fees again, but we were soon let loose in a dark corridor with some amazing figurines from various famous movie franchises. The five of us went on and on about how a certain movie series hit the right spot for some, while others liked the books more than the movie adaptation — making this trip a perfect nerd fantasy for those fans of MCU, DCEU, Terminator, Alien, etc.

We went wild with clicking photographs too - both of the figurines and of ourselves - and while the poor lighting in the dark corridors made it difficult for us to do so - that did not discourage us at all. We also ascended to the second floor to witness more of the lifelike craftsmanship and then paid a visit to the souvenir shop attached to the museum. Even though a bunch of the figurines we found there were available for sale and Michal wanted to purchase the ones from the Alien franchise, the prices were anything but responsible. On stepping out of the museum at around 0100pm Central European Summer Time, I told the folks the story about how KFC kept me from starving because I could be 100% sure about the origin of the served meat. That ended up being the case for our collective as well - but because the meals on the right side of the Prague city center had longer waiting times.

KFC was really a no-brainer fallback option for a bunch of us - even though it is most definitely not at the top of the list for anyone. After paying for Yashwanth's meal as well, I sat down with Fabian, Greg and Michal for some lunch. As the weather was progressively taking a turn for the worse, it felt wise to finish off with food soon and see off Michal, who planned on heading off for the Prague railway station after the meal. Michal left at around 0145pm Central European Summer Time - and the clouds literally gave way as we faced a brief spell of thunderstorm. The four of us sprinted back to the covers when the tree bark (and most importantly, Greg himself) could not prove to be good enough protection from the short yet windy spell of rain - that did not last quite as long as we thought it would.

I could finally take the satisfaction of being resourceful in the situation, as I was finally able to make use of the umbrella that I had been carrying with myself for quite a while. Thankfully, the rain stopped, and we were on our way to the nearby tram station to head over to the National Technical Museum. The conversation on how Red Hat financed personal devices in Belgium was an interesting story to hear from Fabian, because that would mean that while he could save some money by letting the organization pay for it - they could legally enforce the installation of work-related apps on the device. The tram ride was not for long, and we soon ended up entering the next spot while the sky remained cloudy. We finally met up with Sherif Nagy and Jonathan Dieter, who managed to reach before us, and just like others, they were an amazing inclusion to our exploration party!

Fabian (coincidentally and randomly, if you believe him) chose Sherif as our tour guide, and he did an amazing work as one while we were making it through the Optics section of the museum. We got to see loads of ancient optics, ranging from devices like lenses, cameras, projectors, films, etc., and how they evolved over the years with new emerging technologies on the horizon. Greg was interested in visiting the astronomy section of the museum - which we planned on heading to once we were through the sections about physics, chemistry, timekeeping and electronics. We made it to the automotive museum, which arguably took us a while to finish exploring, as it was a massive hall divided across various floors with a huge variety of historically significant vehicles, ranging all the way from humble bicycles to fast cars and from agile aeroplanes to majestic engines.

With varying interests in different vehicles, our group broke into two smaller groups - with me and Greg being a pair and the remaining four in the other group. There were some efforts involved in going through the floors and with our subjective choices of getting to one before the other. I could say for sure that this trip location was definitely fulfilling in more ways than one - I got to learn a bunch about the evolution of vehicles, but at the same time, my phone's memory became full of photographs and videos with just how photogenic almost everything looked there. On our way out of the massive automotive section, the groups reconnected again for some quick respite before heading upstairs to visit the other sections, namely the couple that got our interests, i.e. the domestic devices and astronomy section - the former of which was quickly given up on due to the lack of attention.

I had a particularly fruitful discussion with Greg about his homelab configuration for storage, and it was an interesting contrast from the one that I learned from Tomas. While he purely relied on OpenZFS and RaidZ2 storage configuration on TrueNAS Scale, Greg relied on a combination of MergerFS and SnapRAID storage configuration on barebones Debian Linux. It was down to me to figure out which configuration suited me the best, and it could very well be a hybrid mixture of both as long as it suited my needs. We went through the dark corridor of the astronomy section, filled with a wide assortment of telescopes, scaled models of the solar system, and a whole lot more than that. On Sherif's curiosity, we made our way into the newly created hunting section (you read that correctly), which had various exhibits from ancient hunters from the Asian subcontinent.

We decided to be divided into a couple of groups yet again when we were through with the exploration of the top floors - this time, Sherif, Yashwanth, and me, making an ensemble of folks taking the tram back to the hotel, while Fabian, Jonathan, and Greg decided to walk their way back to the hotel. Near the exit, our group made a brief stop to explore the souvenir store attached to the museum, where I purchased a couple of cans of mints and some souvenir coins for my friends and family, while Sherif grabbed himself a couple of cans of mints and a metal automotive plate. As I had previously helped Fabian with his traversal ticket on our way here, I decided to help out Yashwanth here as I had mistakenly activated a couple of tickets from the PID Litacka application. I do think that there could have been a better job at conveying the cadence of the ticket activation - but oh well!

Yashwanth and I decided to take a break in our return to explore a park that we came across, bidding farewell to Sherif as we left him to head back to the hotel. This was probably the third farewell I had bid him since the morning, and something told me that I would end up meeting him again on this trip. As Yashwanth and I explored the park amidst some light drizzle, we connected on how his academics were going and what his plans looked like for later, before catching another tram back to Andel. The two of us reached the hotel at around 0530pm Central European Summer Time, finding Jonathan, Fabian, Greg, and Sherif at the hotel reception again - hatching evening dinner plans. While I was not initially certain about joining the folks for dinner, I decided to sign up for it as the coleslaw salad and potato chips I saved up from the quick lunch were clearly not enough for me.

With the uncertainty that Yashwanth was in, I asked him to check with the folks in our Signal group on whether he could join in for the meal. He intended to join Justin Wheeler's plan, but as not much came of it by that time, I would have absolutely hated to leave him and head off for the dinner myself. Following my principle of "If there is a door, try knocking on it," Yashwanth's request to join in was met with a resounding agreement. Our collective from Ibis Praha Mala Strana left for Vienna House Andel Prague at around 0630pm Central European Summer Time, where we met with the likes of Matthew Miller and Greg. After taking a medium-sized walk to the Lemon Leaf restaurant that folks spoke glowingly about, I shared some conversation with Aurélien Bompard about his rationale around maintaining Flask OIDC when Authlib also had extensive support for Flask apps.

As I wanted to build atop the porting efforts of Fedora Badges from Pyramid that Aurélien did in the previous year, I wanted to learn as much about it as possible to kickstart my endeavours. At the restaurant as well, we were met by the likes of Samyak Jain and Vipul Siddharth - and after some conversations to extend the reservation by Kashyap Chamarthy, we were soon seated. While the beverages arrived quick and the meals arrived late, we kept ourselves busy with some lively conversations with the likes of Jonathan, Yash, Aurélien, Fabian and Sherif I was seated adjacent to. On our departure from the restaurant, Yashwanth and I went on our way to browse for some Czechia-themed souvenirs like chocolates for him and fridge magnets for myself. I briefly met up with David Kirwan, Samyak, and Vipul near the Andel tram station before retiring to my room for some rest.