Day Two Part I - FOSDEM 2024
Sleeping in on FOSDEM 2024’s second day gave me much-needed respite after the Fedora & CentOS Contributor dinner from the previous night. I joined colleagues at ULB Solbosch, handled Distributions Devroom tasks with the organizers, attended presentations, and helped with the audience's questions.
Waking up late on the second day of FOSDEM 2024 was a good choice as it allowed me to catch up on the much-needed rest after returning late from the Fedora Project & CentOS Project Contributor Dinner the previous night. Instead of going in for the first slot of my moderation duties for the FOSDEM 2024's edition Distributions Devroom with Tomas Hrcka and Fabian Arrotin, I left for the event venue later with Aurelien Bompard and Julia Bley. After finishing breakfast at around 0830 am Central European Standard Time, we came across Pierre-Yves Chibon, who was coincidentally travelling on the same tram amidst our conversations about Karaoke.
We soon found ourselves at the ULB Solbosch Campus and the entire tram got empty like yesterday. While Aurelien Bompard and Pierre-Yves Chibon headed for the Fedora Project booth at the AW building, Julia Bley and I headed further into the campus for the waffle stop and the UA building respectively. Getting to the UA building proved to be quite a challenge for me as I had to travel on a flight of stairs internally through the UD building and then cross a centrally situated garden. My memories of delivering a talk at the UB building in the previous year's edition of Containers helped me navigate quickly without the FOSDEM booklet this time.
On reaching the designated hall for the Distributions Devroom, I was greeted by other volunteers - namely, Sandro, Justin W. Flory, David Cantrell and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek. Unfortunately, I missed the first half of Lennart Poettering's talk on "UKIs, TPMs, Immutable Initrds And Full Disk Encryption" so I did not enter the hall to avoid any unintended commotion. With Sandro giving me an XL-sized volunteer tee-shirt, David Cantrel and I went to an adjacent room to work on a NO ENTRY sign as requested by Justin W. Flory. The FOSDEM 2024 volunteers helped us with materials like sketch pens and chart paper to create that sign.
While creating the NO ENTRY sign, I discussed the Collaboration Development Programme plans I was making for the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering team. Sticking the finished sign on the rear hall gate with help from tall-heightened Sandro and Justin W. Flory allowed us to ensure that only the front gate needed to be monitored. I attended the next few talks by Fernando Fernandez Mancera on "Adapting Your Project: Making Changes Without Breaking Linux Distributions", by Vojtech Polasek and Lukáš Tyrychtr on "Enhancing Linux Accessibility: A Unified Approach" and by Scott McCarty on "The State of Enterprise Linux 2024".
Noticing that the hall was filled with wooden retractable seats that were susceptible to making noises whenever the attendees were leaving or arriving, I slipped out of the hall to create another sign. I handed over the created sign asking people to put their seats silently to Shaun McCance before meeting up with Richard Brown from OpenSUSE and Benny Vasquez from AlmaLinux. With her accompanying Andrew Lukoshko on the stage for the next talk on "AlmaLinux: How To Make A RHEL Compatible Distribution" at around 1200 pm Central European Standard Time, it was my turn to run the microphone throughout the hall to address audience questions.
Sumantro Mukherjee left the hall around the same time as his assigned moderation period was over. The AlmaLinux Foundation's talk was followed by the talks on "Mkosi-Initrd: Building Initrds Out Of Distribution Packages" by Daan De Meyer and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek and on "The Monolith versus The Swarm - A Comparison Of OpenSUSE’s and Fedora’s Build Infrastructures" by Dan Čermák. I had an idea about these talks from my interactions with the speakers during CentOS Connect 2024. Suddenly, an alarm started blaring at around 1315 pm Central European Standard Time during Dan Čermák's presentation.
While Benny Vasquez helped disable the CO2 level alarm, Richard Brown and I went through the hall to open the windows. At the tail end of the hall, I caught up on conversations with Frantisek Lachman and Siteshwar Vashisht before heading off for lunch at around 1330 pm Central European Time. I had roughly thirty minutes to grab what Justin W. Flory got for my lunch and return to the hall as Frantisek Lachman wanted me to attend his talk. Located at some distance from building UA, I headed for building AW to meet with Aoife Moloney, Robert Wright, Nikita Tripathi, Michal Konecny and Julia Bley by the Fedora Project booth.
While munching on the chicken sandwich arranged by Justin W. Flory, I messaged Kushal Das and Anwesha Das to check on their availability as I wanted to share some Indian snacks. Missing barely around the first couple of minutes of Frantisek Lachman's talk, I sprinted across the campus back (and probably made it to the FOSDEM 2024 news) to moderate the talk on "Upstream And Downstream - Best Friends Forever?". The speaker made a stellar utility of the MentiMeter platform to constantly evolve his presentation content based on the feedback received from the conference audience in realtime, something I would like to do myself in my talks.