Day Zero Part II - Flock To Fedora 2023
After going through a difficult choice of which swags to choose and which ones not to, we headed back to the dining space for a quick evening bite. Once done with our dinner, we headed out for a little stroll in the countryside amidst the moist and grey weather equipped with raincoats and parasols.
While I kept myself from grabbing those swags that I already had seen before, I helped myself with the awesome-looking Flock To Fedora Tee and Rocky Linux Tee because these were either specific to this event or I saw them for the first time, and I was pretty sure that I would not find those anywhere else. Once I got myself through the registration, I met up with Jen Madriaga, who was one of the leading organizing members for the conference and worked as a Senior Marketing Manager in Red Hat at the time of writing this article and David Cantrell, who was a Principal Software Engineer in Red Hat at the time of writing this article whom I looked up to as a mentor within the community.
After a little fun chat with them, David and I headed back to the dining space of the hotel where we met with Lenka Segura. David offered to pay for the drinks for Lenka and me - and we went ahead to order ourselves some food as well while we were at it as it was getting a bit late in the day. At around 07:00 pm Ireland Standard Time, we got our food, and I got a call from a concerned Sumantro who was looking for my whereabouts after he got freshened up in his room. I invited him to join us down in the dining space where we three were already seated with our meals and drinks. Sumantro joined us briefly at the table and I had the opportunity to introduce them to each other.
Once we were done with our dinner, we decided to head off to our rooms for a small respite before reassembling later and Sumantro headed off for the meeting with the leadership folks with people joining in from Fedora Council, Fedora Mindshare, Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, CentOS leadership, Rocky Linux leadership, Alma Linux leadership, Red Hat leadership and many more such teams. After some odd 30 minutes, David, Lenka and I met up in the reception area of the hotel and we decided to head off for a little walk along the countryside. Lenka had her raincoat equipped while I had an umbrella for myself and David as we were heading out of the hotel in a drizzle.
As much as it might look like a bad idea to the readers, the countryside looked breathtaking with the greenery surrounding us drenched in rain. The paths near the Hotel Clayton Silver Springs had small hills with dense vegetation surrounding them and it was a fun experience to go around the place for a little walk after dinner. David, Lenka and I shared anecdotes throughout a walk lasting for as much as a couple of kilometres and discussed about things like real estate prices, freaky neighbours, differences in similar-sounding languages and much more. At around 08:30 pm Ireland Standard Time, we returned to the hotel and decided to call it off a day a bit early to recover from the travel fatigue.