Day Zero Part I - Flock To Fedora 2023

This is the account for the first day of my reaching the event venue for Flock To Fedora 2023 which was Hotel Clayton Silver Springs, Tivoli. This counted as day zero for the event because the attendees were still arriving, and the event had not begun. I, Sumantro Mukherjee and Amita Sharma happened to be among those who arrived at the event venue on 1st August 2023. It was at around 04:30 pm Ireland Standard Time that we finally arrived at the hotel from Cork Airport (ORK) on an Uber ride. As soon as got our pieces of luggage off the vehicle, we headed to the reception desk to check into our rooms. As I had my booking done beforehand, I inquired about a room booked in my name.

The payment for the room assigned to me as well as that assigned to Amita Sharma had already been made beforehand. We met Justin W. Flory there who helped us with the checking process and once Sumantro's room assignment was sorted, we headed to our rooms. I had room number 111 while Sumantro was assigned an adjacent one, room number 107. Once I dropped my pieces of luggage, I stepped out immediately after to meet with the community folks - some of whom I was meeting in person after a long while and some others of whom I was meeting in person for the first time. As much as my body could have used some rest then, it was these friends that I was looking forward to meeting.

I messaged David Kirwan, who worked with me in the same team that I worked for, that is Red Hat Community Platform Engineering as a Senior Software Engineer, and we met downstairs in the dining area at around 05:15 pm Ireland Standard Time. We caught up on each other's lives and I inquired if he knew of anyone else from the team who must have arrived by that time. He mentioned the arrival of Lenka Segura on that day, a team member who worked as a Software Engineer in the same team and the fact that Mikhal Konecny, a team member who worked as a Senior Software Engineer in the same team, would arrive the next day. Soon, we were joined by Lenka, to make a three-person group.

David had a Flock To Fedora 2023 card with his name on it so I inquired as to where he got it from. He mentioned the presence of the event registration desk in an auditorium behind the hotel and that is where we headed next because I wanted to get myself registered too. I met with Robert Wright, a budding contributor to the Fedora Websites and Apps Team at the time of writing this article, there at the registration desk and we caught up about the recent developments that they were spearheading for the Fedora Applications Directory. Once I got registered for the conference, I was asked to pick a Flock To Fedora 2023 tee of my size and a bunch of other swags to represent the participation.

I wrote my name, FAS username and pronouns on the Flock To Fedora 2023 card and equipped it before moving on to look into the kinds of swags that were made available for the participants. There were a bunch of swags from a variety of free and open-source software communities such as Rocky Linux branded pens, CentOS branded pens, RPM-OSTree branded pens, Fedora Project branded pens, stickers from NeuroFedora SIG, RDO, Fedora Community, those representing the relationship between Fedora Linux, Fedora ELN and CentOS Stream. As I had collected a bunch of these stickers already during previous events, I decided to take only those that I needed and could make use of.