Day One Part IV - Flock To Fedora 2023

Among all the questions asked and statements made, the two that stuck with me are the ones asked by Sandro, a community friend of mine who worked on the Fedora Badges Revamp alongside myself at the time of writing this article and made by Nick Bebout, who had been one of the crucial community members for the Fedora Infrastructure team. Nick Bebout mentioned the openness of the team, mentioning that the team welcomes not only Red Hat employees but also volunteer contributors while Sandro asked about the footnotes in the slide deck that we created. My excessive use of footnotes in the Fedora Discussions posts that I wrote had apparently gained notoriety in the community.

Once the talk got over, I was finally done with the couple of talks that were assigned to me for the day. At around 1230 pm Ireland Standard Time, people started pouring into the hall beside the Harbour 6 room where the lunch was arranged by the hotel staff. Aoife, myself and a bunch of team members from the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering team met up during lunchtime. For the meal, we had an assortment of sandwiches arranged for us with pork meat, fish meat, chicken and egg fillings, gluten-free chicken skewers, veggie fries, and a choice of beverages from tea and coffee. I connected with a bunch of other folks from a variety of other teams of the Fedora Project here too.

Following the completion of our lunch meals, David and I headed back to the Tivoli hall for the next talk that I was looking forward to for some time now. The talk, scheduled for 0130 pm Ireland Standard Time, was named "Risk It For Biscuit - Linux on RISC-V" and it was to be delivered by Isaac Chute, who worked as the Director of Software Ecosystem at Linux Foundation at the time of writing this article. The interesting talk covered the origin story of the RISC-V architecture and how the open-source platform grew over time. Towards the end of his talk, he also sang us a beautiful ballad, the meaning of which I was unable to understand due to the fact that it was in a certain language that I did not know of.

I stayed back in the Tivoli hall to attend the next talk which was about "Fedora and Open Neuroscience", and it started at around 0230 pm Ireland Standard Time. This talk was originally supposed to be delivered by Ankur Sinha, whom I looked up to as a mentor, but the speakers had to be changed to Sandro and Luis Bazan as he could not make it to the conference. Sandro explained how the platform began humbly with a limited set of scientific packages and now grew to have a bunch of packages from a variety of scientific fields. Once the presentation got over, it was time for yet another hallway track where people could go out to grab some snacks and connect with their community friends.

I talked with a bunch of people who wanted to know about the state of the Fedora Badges 2.0 project that I was helming then and Fedora Contributor Activity Statistics an investigation of which I had performed in the past. I headed back to the Tivoli hall soon after to attend yet another talk that I was excited about titled "Fedora Asahi Remix - Bringing Fedora Linux to Apple Silicon Macs". This presentation was delivered by Neal Gompa, who worked in the Red Hat OpenShift Black Belt team at the time of writing this article and Davide Cavalca, who worked as an infrastructure engineer in Meta then. The talk covered the porting of the already excellent work done by the Asahi Linux contributors.