Experiences @ CentOS Connect 2024

On discovering the thermostat controls tucked comfortably behind a wardrobe, I was able to ensure a good night's sleep for myself by setting it to as high as 26 degrees centigrade. Waking up as early as 0500 am Central European Standard Time, I met up with Fabian Arrotin and Tomas Hrcka for breakfast after getting freshened up. The breakfast consisted of a light constitution of some scrambled eggs, chicken salami, boiled potatoes and a cup of warm cappuccino. Once done with the breakfast, we decided to depart on foot for the Radisson Collection Hotel, Grand Place Brussels and let Michal Konecny and Aurelien Bompard who were running a bit late that day catch up with us. Amidst an enticing discussion about the evolution of radio technology and public infrastructure, we did not even realize how quickly we got the event venue. With our jackets hung and event merchandise picked, I got to meet a bunch of familiar faces from the previous night as well as the ones that I knew for a long time. I was looking for Daan De Meyer to discuss as both of our talk slots were reduced in duration from 50 minutes to 25 minutes and he was going to cover a specific usecase of the Mkosi that I was planning on introducing with my talk. At around 0900 am Central European Standard Time, Shaun McCance's talk about the "CentOS Promo SIG and Docs SIG Updates" began as everyone took their seats at the main event hall.

Throughout the morning, I met up with Sandro from Fedora Infrastructure, Sherif Nagy and Neil Hanlon from Rocky Linux, Pierre-Yves Chibon from Red Hat Automotive, Dan Cermak from OpenSUSE and many others. Shaun McCance's reflection on zero reported code of conduct incidents was followed by, Frantisek Lachman's talk about "Bridging The Gap: Packit Automation For CentOS And Upstream Projects" at 0930 Central European Standard Time and Troy Dawson's talk about "Open Secrets Of CentOS Stream" at 1000 am Central European Standard Time. The presentation that took the most audience attention would most likely be the one about "The Self Abolition Of Enterprise Linux Distributions" from one of the mentors of my early Fedora Project days, Dan Cermak. At around 1030 am Central European Standard Time, he covered the returned focus on modularity and the desirability of package maintenance due to a fast-moving ecosystem. During the break time, Tomas Hrcka and I sat down to discuss the problem I was facing with my homelab infrastructure using a spinning hard drive for a Samba mount when Justin W. Flory borrowed me for some time. He was facing a timeout issue when transferring huge repositories using Pagure Exporter. As the two of us were not only in the same timezone but were also colocated, debugging issues of an application project felt like a breeze.

The debugging of the "Mentored Projects" repository move and the discussions about it with Sumantro Mukherjee led me to miss a couple of talks scheduled after the short break - namely, Joel Capitao's and Christian Glombeck's "Cloud SIG Update" at 1115 am Central European Standard Time and Karolina Kula's and Alfredo Moralejo Alonso's "OpenStack RDO Deployment On Community Distribution Of Kubernetes (OKD)" at 1145 am Central European Standard Time. With that, it was time for the lunch break which was served in the event by the courtesy of CentOS Project and I decided to take my light serving of chicken curry to have conversations with Aurelien Bompard and Julia Bley at a nearby table. After swiftly wrapping up my lunch meal by around 0115 pm Central European Standard Time, I headed into the event room to set up my laptop as the talk scheduled about "Building And Utilizing Purpose-Built GNU/Linux Distribution Images Using Mkosi" after the lunch break was to be delivered by me. I asked Michal Konecny and Aurelien Bompard to click some pictures and the personnel assigned with the AV duties helped me with projector setup to ensure that I had my speakernotes and my presentation visible at the same time. The talk went smoothly for the most part and I was able to wrap up the talk in around 22 minutes, thus being under the limit of 25 minutes assigned to me.

Meeting up with Daan De Meyer and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek before the talk was useful as it helped discuss the specificities of my handing over to them because the next talk at 0215 pm Central European Standard Time about "Testing the CentOS Hyperscale Systemd Backport With Mkosi" was to be delivered by him. After wishing him luck on the stage, I headed down into the audience and became busy hacking on some pull requests on a Fedora Infrastructure project named Noggin with Aurelien Bompard. While debugging the Towncrier module that was useful in generating automatic changelogs whenever a new release was made, I started creating dinner plans with my teammates from the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering. I briefly stepped out of the event room to congratulate Dan Cermak on his successful presentation and I hit off a great conversation. Sandro reached out to me briefly during a conversation with Frantisek Lachman to inquire about a certain set of Dist Git repositories showing 502 error and I decided to redirect them to Alexandra Fedorova as the problem was related to continuous integration stages failing to resolve some dependency packages. At around 0400 pm Central European Standard Time, Saheli Das Mukherjee and Nikita Tripathi returned from their trip to a nearby tourist attraction with whom I caught up on curious conversations about all the sights they had seen.

Tomas Hrcka soon stepped out of the event room to join me in conversations in an adjacent presentation room where we were joined by Peter Boy. While catching up meeting after a long time, he mentioned his inability to contribute to the community for some time due to an accident that he came across. We would never like it if a friend were to focus on contributions more than on their wellbeing so we had him promise us to take care of himself. As the plans for dinner with the team might not come to fruition, I stayed back with Justin W. Flory who gave me a quick orientation about the Fedora Project FOSDEM booth presence while Tomas Hrcka and Julia Bley headed back to the hotel. As she was feeling under the weather that day, Tomas Hrcka decided to help her back to the hotel while I decided to navigate my way back from the event venue at around 0600 pm Central European Standard Time. I decided not to go for the FLOSS Foundations Dinner that was scheduled at around 0730 pm Central European Standard Time, partly because I did not have anyone to go there with but mostly because I had run out of my social batteries for the day. I let Justin W. Flory know about the same and hence, someone else could be able to get in my place as I felt responsible for not letting a limited registration go to waste. After hanging out with Tomas Hrcka in my room for some time, I decided to call it a day and prepare for the FOSDEM 2024.