Day Three - Flock To Fedora 2026

I found the sunrays hitting my face at around 0430am Central European Summer Time on 16th June 2026, as I forgot to put the curtains on the night before. Being in the Northern Hemisphere, the cities of Czech Republic enjoyed longer durations of sunlight as compared to us living near the equatorial line. Even though I woke up a couple of hours before my scheduled alarm, I could state that I was gradually getting used to the time zone shift and the hotel bedding. As there were only two planned involvements for me on that day, i.e. Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session and Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 Contributor Recognition Awards Programme, I decided to have myself assigned to the registration duty for the first part of the day to ensure that I was able to be of assistance for however long I was present there.

After having a (slightly better) breakfast meal with Tomáš Hrčka and Cristian Le at around 0700am Central European Summer Time, Tomáš left early for a morning walk while Cristian and I decided to leave for the event venue a little while later. I got to know from him that he was planning on leaving for Brno that evening after the conference finished as we made it to Orea Hotel Andel Prague. Moving up from my designated slot with Michal Konecny, Cristian and I hung out at the front desk of the event. While we were not expecting many registrations at the tail end of the conference, we also had to be there as a source of information. I was also reached out to by Rajan Shah on WhatsApp, who was planning on visiting a Flock event for the first time before travelling on to attend DevConf.CZ 2026 in Brno.

Putting my work laptop on charge there and helping Cristian with a power bank, I saw Jennifer Schimmoller and Dorka Volavkova arriving at the registration desk. While helping Dorka bring the sweets from the International Candy Swap event to the main table, Jennifer swiftly onboarded me to the (very intuitive) Pretalx ticket scanning application. It was interesting to see just how the ecosystem application also provided the metadata information about what size of tee shirts I was tasked to offer to the attendees, thus lowering the entry barrier towards volunteering in conferences by quite a lot. We also faced a couple of exceptional cases there, with attendees requesting tee shirt switches due to incorrect sizes and incorrect status, both of which were handled by us volunteers present at the registration desk.

Even though we were almost certain that there would not be a lot of new check-ins on the third day, Jennifer still advised me to request folks who were seeking more tee shirts to return at around 0300pm Central European Summer Time. It would allow us to hand over the last ones to the longtime Fedora contributors for their (potentially possible) forward distribution in their respective regions. Placing the badge card ahead also got Maxwell G to reach out to me as the Fedora Badges service administrator, as the social event badge achievement had expired by then. While I did award him the badge achievement manually, I reactivated the specific invitation so that it would expire that midnight, as manually awarding those to almost hundreds of people after the event's end would not be a scalable solution.

At around 0900am Central European Summer Time, I met up with Jeremy Cline and Brian Exelbierd at the registration desk. Just like a lot of my Fedora Project friends, it was great to meet up with them after over a year since our previous chat during Flock To Fedora 2025. Amidst our discussions on our interactions with agentic tooling for software development and our frustrations related to business travel policies, I was surprised (read horrified) to notice that Brian (of all people) had somehow begun preparing slides for his presentations. While he was more than capable of "winging" the talk – an impressive quality that he had more than exhibited in the Fedora Project and at Red Hat for years – it was interesting to see how veterans like him also sought practice for the stage talk, every now and then.

The three of us also debated the use of agentic technologies among (mostly newer) engineers. I stated that the immediate utilization of generative tooling by incoming developers was much akin to young students' direct usage of calculators without ever starting by calculating on their fingers. He disagreed with the notion, stating that it does not matter whether a cook knew about the internals of a microwave oven or not, as long as they knew how to use it. We both eventually agreed on it being important for human developers to know what they wanted for them to be able to get there. Upon being joined by Jaroslav Řezník, I left for Kevin Fenzi's infrastructure presentation at around 1000am Central European Summer Time, while working with Jona Azizaj on the planned event of Fedora Mentor Summit.

She had to scrap the work done by Eduardo Javier Echeverria Alvarado on the slide deck to create a new one during the previous night. Through a brief spat with Michel Lind on the eligibility for obtaining the social event badge achievements, I took the feedback of potentially introducing newer ones that could also be received by our remote attendees. After another chat with Michael Scherer in the Sapphire room, we moved into the Topaz + Quartz shared room to attend the next couple of talks on Fedora Accessibility Test Days and Accelerating Microsoft Contributions To Fedora Project at around 1130am Central European Summer Time. Finishing up a chat with Artur Frenszek-Iwicki and Cristian, I finally met Rajan, whom I also invited to join us at the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026's Lunch And Learn Activity.

Offering the Forgejo Project's peel view for reviewing artwork asset differences during Emma's interactive presentation on Open Source Design Considerations, it was finally time for the lunch break at around 0100pm Central European Summer Time. With how Rajan had been leading DevConf.IN for the last couple of years, I knew that he was a reliable ally for the Fedora Project whenever we wanted to bring the community presence to India. Maybe we could have the next iteration in India? We never knew what the future had in store, but we did our best to make the most of Flock 2026's last day. After sharing lunch with him, Ankur Sinha and Michael, I was briefly pulled aside by Aoife Moloney for some schedule changes.

She wanted to reduce the effective duration of the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session by about fifteen minutes to squeeze in all the lightning talks. I was split on this as this was Fedora Mindshare's visible presence after many years, I also knew that fifteen more minutes would allow all the lightning talks to be covered. Being the session chair, I conditioned my approval by asking her to be highly strict with answering times so that we were able to keep the session as interactive as possible. After all, the Townhall Session was planned to be a pathway towards the intricate conversations after the event's proceedings. Being a means for folks to know more about the committee's charter after the recent election, I wanted for it to empower to organize more localized events and encourage ways to recognize contributions.

Finally, being seated at the Plenary Hall for the Lightning Talks at around 0200pm Central European Summer Time, I discovered that all the speakers did a great job of finishing their planned content on time. As I had a slide deck to present during the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session, I was extremely grateful when we ended up getting Ankur's laptop to present from. From the previous charter, only Emma and I were present there, while Matthew Holmes represented the incoming one on the stage. Helping set up the seats myself, we started off with a round of charter introductions before elaborating further on the progress made by the team during the previous term. As the Mindshare Representative to Fedora Council, I have had a statistical approach towards observing both our progress and our learnings.

The interactive session went well, with us taking feedback on what we could build on from Peter Boy's and Jef Spaleta's questions. Finishing this session at around 0315pm Central European Summer Time, I had a chat with Vít Smolík and Jonáš Hubený, who reflected on the rarity of the Stroopwafel achievement. Shockingly enough, not only did we have Justin Wheeler at the stage and Kevin seated in the front rows, but we were also joined by Adam Williamson – the three of whom were amazing (read crazy) enough to make the top cut. It was also impressive to see just how successful Vít had become in his contributions to the Fedora Project in a short period. At around 0400pm Central European Summer Time, we finally kicked off the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 Contribution Recognition Awards Programme.

With Jona kicking off the final session by marking the 2026 iteration as the fifth iteration of the Fedora Mentor Summit's proceedings, I took over soon after to explain how the process worked in the background. We were also grateful to Benson Muite, Cornelius Emase and the Nairobi GNU/Linux User Group, who got us laser-cut tangible trophies for the winners. Speaking of the winners, the three winners were Fabio Valentini, Justin Forbes and Ankur this time around, with the session attendees taking part in celebrating their recognition. This programme finally paved the way for the Closing Ceremony, and with the event finally brought to a successful closure by around 0430pm Central European Summer Time, it was time for farewells, goodbyes and forward travelling to DevConf.CZ 2026 too!

With some chat with the programme winners to congratulate them and with Adam to thank him for his continued work on the judging panel, Carol Chen gifted me an event souvenir from Finland. I also hung around for a little while longer to take pictures with Michael Winters (as he proudly called us, "The Data Guys" haha) and with Cornelius in his traditional wear. Dropping off my backpack at Ankur's room, since he was staying at the event venue, we planned to visit a drinking place called Beer Time. While it was just him and me initially, we were soon joined by Hristo Marinov, Christopher Klooz, Jeremy Cline, Emma Kidney, Jess Chitas, Matthew and many others. We marched to the next location and, following their suggestion, I also found myself having a sweet-tasting, enjoyable drink with limited alcohol.

After a couple of rounds of (250ml-sized) Van Honsebroucks and countless chats around the community and family, we decided that it was time for late dinner at around 0700pm Central European Summer Time. While we had to bid Cristian farewell as he had to leave for Brno, this additional time with our Fedora Project friends definitely allowed our community bonds to further deepen. On my advice, our collective soon found itself at the Old Hanoi restaurant – almost poetically finishing the Flock conference where it started. Amidst the continued tête-à-tête, I did find myself getting drowsier by the passing minute, so I had to leave at around 0830pm Central European Summer Time post having the Crispy Garlic Duck Dish so that I could get some rest before my long return flights home on the next day.

We also met with a couple of dining groups at the Old Hanoi restaurant, which seemed to have become a household name for the last couple of Flock events that we had in Prague – one with Matthew Miller and the Fedora Quality team folks, and the other with Jef, Aoife and Shaun. Making a stop at Ankur's room yet again for my travelling backpack, I also chanced upon David Duncan and Neal Gompa in the hotel lobby. Leaving the celebration collective at the Anděl crossing, I could not think of a better way to close the event's gathering, with me leaving for the Ibis Praha Mala Strana hotel to call it a night after around 0900pm Central European Summer Time and them continuing along the way. As I was not going DevConf.CZ, despite repeated requests from Hristo, I had to leave for Kolkata the next day.