Day Two - Flock To Fedora 2025

The second day of Flock To Fedora 2025 began with me finally being able to wake up fresh after a good night's sleep from the day before at 0600am Central European Summer Time on 06th June 2025. While Michal Konecny and Sumantro Mukherjee remarked on their plans of heading there late, I had a couple of talks in the first half of the day. I checked up with Ankur Sinha, who was just about getting ready for the conference, as I headed downstairs for the breakfast after getting freshened up. I soon met up with the likes of Brendan Conoboy, David Kirwan, Fabian Arrotin, and Stef Walter - with whom I shared conversations. Just like the day before, I decided to keep myself to the veggies, as I did not quite like the selection provided at the hotel. After a brief conversation with Frantisek Lachman at the breakfast area, David and I grabbed our backpacks from our hotel rooms.

We happened to make it to Vienna House Andel Prague quite early at around 0800am Central European Summer Time, when folks were still finishing off their breakfast. That gave me some time to catch up with the likes of Robert Wright and Luis Segundo before heading into the hall for the first event of the day — Mentor Mentee Sticker Swap. The fun event was mediated by us, who were organizing the Fedora Mentor Summit proceedings during the event, and was well received by folks who embraced randomly matching with other folks based on the sticker similarity. Jona Azizaj, Smera Goel, and I kicked off the event, and I soon joined a group consisting of Ant Carrol, Greg Sutcliffe, Michal, and others. Not only did we share interesting conversations, but we also clicked a bunch of pictures to remember this randomized yet enticing matching of people in the event.

At around 0930am Central European Summer Time, I wished the best to the confused pair of Jona and Smera, who assumed that their talk would take place in the Topaz hall, and started off with my presentation on "Introducing SyncStar - Create Bootable Media At Conference Kiosks". While I had prepared for a live demonstration, I was unable to render display using my laptop, even after some assistance from the likes of Miroslav Vadkerti and Frantisek, so I had to proceed with some screenshots. The talk was well received by the folks, as evidenced by the bunch of questions subjected towards the interest around the SyncStar project. It seemed like the fumbling from the previous day's talk ended up fortifying the performance on those I was delivering that day — with proper balancing of duration among the things spoken, the questions answered, and the interactions shared.

Once my talk was through, I briefly met up with Brendan, who congratulated me on the presentation, and we shared some conversations around the landscape of in-person free and open source software events around the globe. After a chat on what my preferences towards the location and the scheduling would look like for potential future Flock To Fedora proceedings, it was time for Brian Exelbierd's talk on One Year In: Microsoft as a Fedora Contributor. I headed out to have a chat with him and Patrik Polakovic after his talk, to commend his efforts on his presentation. Refreshments were served at around 1100am Central European Summer Time while I was hanging around at the hallway track, finding folks that I had not yet previously had interactions with, and had conversations with them — before, of course, heading back to the Topaz hall for the next presentation.

We had a twelfth-moment addition to the Mentored Project Learnings & Demos slot that was previously shared among Aurelien Bompard, Sumantro, and me. While this arrangement was made to accommodate the talk that Aurelien and I submitted with that of Sumantro's in an hour-long slot, the sudden change was not notified to me, which caused some confusion. Both Aurelien and I had to adjust our speaker notes accordingly, as with the change, Fernando Fernandez Mancera would be following up on the Outreachy progress after Sumantro's talk on the Google Summer of Code progress. Thankfully, we had enough time for covering the ground with all the questions and remarks subjected to us, and people were immensely interested in establishing an inclusive Fedora Project community where everyone is a mentor to someone, and everyone is a mentee to someone.

We were asked a bunch of questions from the attendees, which further cemented our engagement with the audience and made amazing use of people present in person. I was congratulated by Greg, who also remarked on some possible improvements to the presentation, that I duly took notes from to improve upon, and he also mentioned just how he loved the motivation aspect of what makes people want to continue contributing. I attended the following talk after ours by Samyak Jain and Nikita Tripathi on Open Source Mentorship: Crafting Communities, Creating Leaders before joining the large queue at the dining area for the lunch. The tuna was a bit better seasoned than the day before, and the meat tasted slightly better, but I relied more on the table conversations with Timothee Ravier, Ankur, and Christopher Klooz to satiate my large appetite of curiosity.

On the dining table, we struck conversations around the desserts available there, and Ankur remarked on just how likely it is for him to fail the Marshmallow Test. Ankur and I headed back to the plenary hall once we were through with the lunch, where we attended Justin Wheeler's talk on Scaling Fedora Ready Through Community Contributions. This was an amazing (deemed-to-be) self-sustaining initiative where the community could help its own by providing reviews on devices that support Fedora Linux and/or come pre-installed with Fedora Linux. Therefore, the community could be enabled to make wise choices on which devices to purchase for a more premium experience out of the box. While not being a standard certification, people were encouraged to share their findings from the device purchases they make amidst the impending end of support for Windows 10.

I stepped out once the presentation was wrapped up to meet up with Greg, who was looking for a laptop with a full-sized HDMI port. While I could not make my laptop work for my talk, I was hoping to be of help to Greg, as his laptop gave a display output through a USB-C port, a converter for which we did not have. After helping him set things up on my laptop, I went ahead to have conversations with Luis Bazan and Ankur in the hallway track again before going back to chat with Kevin Fenzi. I also had a quick conversation with Frantisek and Miroslav, who wanted to understand just how they can set up an ephemeral Fedora Infrastructure deployment based on pull requests. With our applications and services having many moving parts, I recommended them to get started with setting up Tiny Stage locally before scaling it up using automated OpenShift deployments.

I was feeling sleepier by the passing minute, so I decided to get some Coffee with Milk before I headed into Greg's lightning talk at around 0400pm Central European Summer Time. In his fast-paced talk, he covered a variety of avenues from Discourse, beginning from the email vs UI workflow to bookmarks, and from badges and events to labels and statistics. We also considered replacing Fedora Calendar (or Fedocal) with the calendar in Discourse after the talk was through, before leaving for Ibis Praha Mala Strana with my backpack. As the boat was expected to depart from the docks at 0700pm Central European Summer Time, it was important for us to make it there soon — unless, of course, folks were looking forward to swimming. I took my jacket and a parasol with me in case there were chances of rain while heading back with Michal, Kevin, David, and Tomas Hrcka.

As the event venue was only a couple of blocks away, we were able to make it back to Vienna House Andel Prague at around 0500pm Central European Summer Time - just in time to attend the Ask Me Anything session hosted by the Fedora Council. While Sumantro was handling the mic-running duty for the session, I asked him to return his backpack safely, and I ended up handling the mic-running duty temporarily for the second half of the session in his place. With questions and remarks from the likes of Peter Robinson, Stephen Gallagher, and Brendan from the in-person attendees, and Eduard Lucena from the remote attendees, the Fedora Council panel elegantly took them on. I appreciated Aoife Moloney's sharing the credit of the Git Forge Move initiative with the likes of Tomas and myself — an act that only makes us want to do more, wherever and whenever possible.

At around 0545pm Central European Summer Time, the closing remarks were delivered for the event by Justin, and we made our way downstairs to gather for the departure from the event venue. Lukas Ruzicka, Frantisek Zatloukal, and Lukas Brabec gladly volunteered to direct the attendee crowd through the metro station and onto the boat at the dock. I made use of the PID Litacka application to purchase myself a ticket for the subway, and while sharing the journey with the likes of Daniel Mellado — with whom I was meeting up after FOSDEM 2025 — and Michal, we soon made it to the docks. When we were aboard the boat, I was sharing a dining table with the likes of Sarah Julia Kriesch, Tim Flink, and Frantisek. With beverages served at the beginning, we caught up on conversations about how things were going with our professions and conference events.

The boat definitely felt very calm in its movement, contrary to the situation that I had imagined in my mind. We soon got ourselves some meal from the onboard buffet - with me keeping it to some chicken wings and veggies for the early dinner at around 0730pm Central European Summer Time. The boat going around the river definitely kept things interesting with the changing sceneries for embracing around the riverside. As we had to wait quite a bit to have our tabs cleared, Tim thankfully volunteered to do so, and with that, it was time to head upstairs to enjoy the cool breeze. I reconnected with the likes of Cristian Le, Ankur, and Christopher atop the deck after checking in with my folks from the Red Hat Community Linux Engineering team. With a plentiful of selfies taken and a bunch of goofing around the deck, we posed for a quick Flock To Fedora 2025 group photograph.

We were soon called downstairs by Aoife for Matthew's "graduation ceremony" (you read it correctly), but we did not budge before she featured in one of our goofy selfies. Amidst the troubling microphone and emotions surfacing, Stephen delivered a heartfelt speech to commemorate a decade-long service that Matthew has provided at the helm of the Fedora Project community. In the meanwhile, I also took some time to thank Natalie for all the hard work done by her alongside the likes of Dorota Volavkova and Justin in making Flock To Fedora 2025 a major success. I understood just how important recognition can be for folks as a driving force, and I wanted to do the same for my friends who put in some amazing efforts. We headed upstairs again for yet another round of pictures - especially the one taken from the bridge that our boat was stationed below after a couple of hours.

While we could have the boat to ourselves and enjoy the drinks for yet another hour, it most definitely was not as fun as when the boat was moving around. I joined a group consisting of Michal and his brother, Jiri Konecny, Martin Kolman, Tomas, Lenka Segura, and others. We were also joined by Peter Boy and Yashwanth Rathakrishnan, and together we decided to walk back to the accommodation instead of catching another tram. Jiri and I geeked on about our homelab setups on our way back while we kept enjoying the scenes walking beside the river. From topics around batteries-included reverse proxy solutions, to the proper use of Fedora CoreOS, and from setting up NextCloud properly to WireGuard setups to securely expose the services - we were all about the self-hosting life, so much so that we did not even realize when the relatively long walk came to an end.

After seeing off the Anaconda team folks near Vienna House Andel Prague, Tomas and Yashwanth went to book trams as Michal, Lenka, and I headed back to the hotel at around 0930pm Central European Summer Time. We were joined by the likes of Sherif Nagy, Stef, and Fabian, and it turned out that we were not the only ones who walked back from the boat-ride dinner. A couple of selfies with Stef's goofy makeshift hair later, we discussed possible exploration plans for Sunday, as the previously planned Fedora Friends Social Day was now cancelled. While we could not quite come to a cemented plan on what we wanted to do, I decided not to worry much about the same and instead focus on the workshops that I wanted to participate in and help organize the next day. I decided to call it a day after getting freshened up at around 1030pm Central European Summer Time.