Fedora Project Community Corner @ DevConf.IN 2026 - Day Two

Returning early from the dinner on the previous day was the right call to make, given how packed we were expecting the second day of DevConf.IN 2026 to be. Since this was going to be on 14th February 2026, i.e., a Saturday (and, of course, Valentine's Day), we would most likely have a greater footfall of folks around the conference professing their eternal love for free and open source software that day. I found myself waking up before the scheduled alarm, and as I had some time, I started working on manually awarding the attendees the event badge. For an over-occupied booth like ours, it was especially important since many folks could not get the chance to scan the QR code, and the greater attention was, of course, taken up by the DevConf.IN 2026's visitor choice, Fedora Project Community Trivia.

Learning from the previous day's mistakes, I also decided to give myself some time for breakfast before getting an Uber ride. Somehow, I was able to get one without having to go through more than a couple of cancellations at around 0900am Indian Standard Time. After picking up the swagpacks, Shounak Dey and I set the location directly to the Vyas Building of MIT World Peace University - thus removing the hauling efforts from the day before. I also checked with the likes of Yashwanth Rathakrishnan and Samyak Jain in the meantime, both of whom had their hotel bookings a lot closer to the conference venue. Yashwanth had to skip breakfast since an Uber ride was arranged for him before he could get some food, while Samyak took his time to get ready and head over to the conference venue.

Funnily enough, it was Matthew Miller, this time around, who had arrived at the venue by around 1000am Indian Standard Time and was lounging at the Fedora Project Community Corner. Shounak and I chuckled at the photograph shared by Yashwanth while we were on the way, since our punctuality from the day before might have most likely rubbed off on him. After a smooth ride, we soon arrived at the venue entrance at around 1030am Indian Standard Time. Given that we had the lay of the land and our posters were already placed properly, we had more time to conveniently set up our swagpacks and exhibits at our booth. I checked in with Matthew about how his preparations for his talk were going, while Shounak and Yashwanth started arranging the swagpacks and exhibits on the booth desk.

Samyak decided to add a couple more tricky questions to the question list of the Fedora Project Community Trivia. That was a brilliant idea since it allowed visitors from the previous day to go out of their way to explore more about the Fedora Project and its dealings. As we were quite economical with handing out swagpacks the day before, and none of us was in the mood for taking them back home, we decided to be rather generous that day. I devised a plan for handing out our limited-edition Fedora Project magnet-and-clip combo to the attendees entering Matthew's talk to appreciate their presence there, while Matthew contemplated whether he should extend his talk to include 35 Fedora Linux releases instead of the previously planned 30 of them, since he had to manage the talk duration.

As his talk was scheduled for 0115pm Indian Standard Time, we had more than enough time before then to attend to the visitors. We also decided to temporarily shut down the Fedora Project Community Corner for those 45 minutes to allow a larger audience to attend Matthew's presentation instead. Unfortunately, just like the day before, visitors continued to confuse our booth with the DevConf.IN registration desk. We had a frustrated Samyak craft a handwritten note at our booth to guide folks to the actual DevConf.IN registration desk. His frustrations were well placed, as even though we loved interacting with visitors, we would rather spend time and energy talking about the Fedora Project and Red Hat than being punished for the booth's attendance by becoming glorified compasses.

A quick catch-up with Sudhir Dharanendraiah allowed me to remind him of the community dinner that we were planning to have later that day at Ishaara, Viman Nagar, and also share some Fedora Project stickers with him for them to be shared by the Red Hat India Communities booth personnel. That not only helped out the staff there, but it also allowed the Fedora Project to be cross-promoted across multiple co-located booths. Following this, I headed over next to the DevConf.IN registration desk to avail myself of a couple of DevConf.IN-themed magnets and clips. To return the goodwill, I also shared some Fedora Project magnet-and-clip combos with them to be shared by the visiting attendees, a gesture that they not only appreciated but that also allowed us to further pursue cross-promotion.

At around 1200pm Indian Standard Time, Shounak and Yashwanth took off to explore the booths around DevConf.IN 2026, leaving Samyak and me to tend to the booth visitors. While the footfall did drop by the time they left, it slowly started picking up pace about fifteen minutes later, with questions around .NET compatibility in Fedora Linux and security developments in the Fedora Project. There was another wave of quiz participants who checked in with us about the Fedora Project Community Trivia answer keys and verified where they got things wrong. It was rather refreshing to see that while there were a few visitors who were argumentative about their defeat, a greater number embraced getting to know the things that they did not previously know about the Fedora Project and its dealings.

One of the learnings we took away from organising an interactive event that made the best use of visitors being there in person was to order more exclusive swagpacks in the future. With Samyak dropping another handcrafted note to inform visitors about the temporary shutdown and me wrapping things up at the booth desk, we were pleasantly surprised by Sayak Sarkar, who managed to make it to the venue early that day. Samyak set up a countdown timer on his iPad placed on the booth desk to expire at around 0100pm Indian Standard Time to let folks know the same. After a quick catch-up with both Sayak and Deepesh Nair, we had the returning Shounak and Yashwanth haul the swagpacks and exhibits to the first floor's VY0104 room, where Matthew's talk was scheduled to be organised.

As Matthew was getting prepared for the talk, Shounak made his way to the elevated back of the room with his fancy Canon DSLR camera. Yashwanth and I worked on arranging the swagpacks on one of the front desks so that attendees could help themselves. The room was soon filled to the brim, and the talk went well, albeit with some minor considerations, with Matthew having to speed up the delivery toward the end to accommodate five more releases. Matthew also ensured that there was some time left at the end for questions and feedback; a bunch of them were related to artificial intelligence, his experience, changing times, and newer responsibilities. With the talk getting wrapped up at around 0200pm Indian Standard Time, the Fedora Project Indian Crew made it back to the ground floor.

We had to wash our plans of having lunch at around that time down the drain since the booth activities were planned to wrap up earlier that day. That would have essentially meant that we had to be around to declare the winners of the second day of the Fedora Project Community Trivia at around 0230pm Indian Standard Time. Samyak made himself busy populating the scores on the raffle service while Shounak unsuccessfully tried sharing the progress on the Fedora Badges Revamp Project with Sayak. The poor cellular data reception, along with the wireless downtimes, made it extremely difficult for us to connect to the outside world. Yashwanth and I instead decided to field other conversations around the use of Fedora Linux in the robotics field and other adjacent infrastructure uses.

Matthew joined us soon, asking for feedback, and I shared that it would have been best to cover the earlier releases quickly while spending more time on the recent ones, because it was his personal experience as the Fedora Project Leader that people were there for. Since we coincidentally had him around then, it just made sense for him to felicitate the lucky winners with the exclusive Fedora Project-themed sippers. With Kashyap Ekbote helping us with the pictures after we were through with the awarding ceremony, Rajan Shah appreciated us for putting up a great show of community engagement at the conference. At around 0330pm Indian Standard Time, we started wrapping up our booth operations, with many enthusiastic visitors returning to express just how much they liked us there.

Samyak and I went around reminding Matthew and Sayak about the dinner that he had booked previously in the morning, before seeing them off. For the late lunch, though, Shounak and Samyak discovered the La Sicilia Bistro and Patisserie restaurant, which was barely under five kilometres away from the event venue. On our way out, we swiftly got ourselves some photographs at the DevConf.IN 2026 event entrance was before we booked an Uber ride to the meal place. While the likes of Sudhir and Kashyap could not join us for lunch, Avadhoot Dhere gracefully joined our little party, and we did end up having quite the delicacies while sharing the best moments of the day. We saw each other off at around 0500pm Indian Standard Time after a rather late lunch and returned home on a quiet Uber ride.

Having had a brief respite, one hell of a confusing disaster struck when I checked with Sudhir to restate the location of the restaurant. It turned out that Samyak had prebooked the wrong branch of the Ishaara restaurant, which was about thirty kilometres on the outskirts of the city, i.e., in Wakad and not the one that was under approximately ten kilometres from all ends, i.e., in Viman Nagar. I checked in with Samyak, but after not hearing back from him, I decided to create a new booking under my name amidst the filled capacity due to the Valentine's Day evening. Thankfully, I was able to get one, and after hearing from Matthew and Karen Miller about them having gone to the wrong location, I asked them to go on without us because it would have taken at least a couple of hours just to get there.

Even Samyak had to tap out since he was feeling under the weather after all the work from the day, so I checked in with the likes of Shounak, Yashwanth, and Sudhir to reconfirm the correct location at around 0730pm Indian Standard Time. It was quite the mess-up, but I was not going to let the Fedora Project's community presence at DevConf.IN 2026 end on a sour note. The four of us ordered light bites with hand gestures, as the restaurant employed specially-abled people, and it was an enlightening experience to witness the world from their perspective. After some interesting conversations and unpacking catchups, Sudhir and Yashwanth left first before Shounak and I were able to find ourselves an Uber ride, finally breathing a sigh of relief after having organised this throughout the last couple of long days.