My first conference outside of Brno after the pandemic. I forgot how stressed I am from the travelling. Didn’t have to wait long to realize why:

• traffic jam in Brno
• 90 minutes flight delay
• downpour of people on the airport
• border control scanners not made for my height
• missing connections because of delays
• never-ending transfers

All of this was worth the frustration to absorb Flock energy and magic.

Thank you, Red Hat, for funding my travel. Even though I didn’t have any session (with Laura we wanted to talk about how we work as a team — the session wasn’t accepted).

So I volunteered to be the “mike guy” in the afternoon (introduce speakers, run around with microphone). It was fun, and a lot of work!! Shout out to all the conference volunteers. You MAKE conferences happen.

I loved this made me attend sessions I wouldn’t normally go to: RISC-V, Fedora Asahi Remix, Neuroscience with Fedora, Designing badges. All of them were great with lots of new info for me.

generate("random flock thoughts")

• Fedora Packit badges could be a thing.

• Fedora CoreOS could utilize Packit and Testing Farm.

• My favourite quote is from David Cantrell’s talk: “coding is easy, marketing is hard”.

• AI can be used to detect false positive test results.

• Neal asked me to enable Packit for KDE’s gitlab.

• I know what SPDX is thanks to Mirek and Tom.

Packit

Folks know and use and praise our project. This warms my heart 💙

Laura and Simon delivered a dense session on Packit and Testing Farm. So dense there were no Packit questions.

Enterprise Linux Panel discussion

One of the most hyped session of the conference: panel discussion with core contributors of enterprise linux communities: Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, Alma.

There was no fistfight.

It was amazing to see folks discuss and understand each other’s perspectives. Users still want free and easily accessible RHEL [bits] and there are communities that want to provide it. Everyone wants to collaborate.

What does Red Hat want?

The most engaging talk I saw in-person in a while. Bex carefully articulated his sentences. They perfectly described Red Hat’s stance in open source communities, in Fedora, CentOS and the reasoning behind decisions.

I like Bex’s quote: “Rebuild of RHEL that is sold cheaper hurts everyone”. I fully agree — RHEL is a commercial product. What value are you adding if you sell the same bits but cheaper? Once there is a distinction: new architecture or hardware support, new things on top, different cycle… That’s where the value is coming.

A must watch.

Cork

This city was an interesting choice for the conference. I would prefer something warm (😅): it felt weird to pack autumn clothes in the middle of summer.

I loved the guided Ghost tour where we learned more about Cork and Ireland. As I’m born in Slovakia, I could relate to many of the historic events that happened in Ireland.

The drinking and social aspect of the conference was draining my batteries hard. I had to zone out multiple times to recharge so I could withstand the evenings.

Thank you to volunteers, speakers, organizers and the hotel staff!

To: me
Date: 2024
Subject: Book Flock 2024, don't be a wuss