Today was the first day of the Flock 2017 conference in Cape Code.

I arrived there on Sunday, giving me a little time to adjust to the jet lag so I was somewhat ready for this first day. It started with the traditional talk from the Fedora Project Leader about the State of Fedora, updating us on statistics and explaining some of the challenges we as a community are facing and are working on. Having followed or being involved in some of these changes, it was nice to see them brought forward as being important objectives for us to work on.

After that we got a pitch from all the speakers at the conference about what they are going to present or work on. There is quite a large diversity of topics as usual which gets into the traditional struggle of "what do I attend?" :-)

This afternoon, we had our pagure hackfest which has been quite productive considering how many people were present (there were some quite interesting talks at the same time, cf the question above). We fixed the milter integration which allows to comment on issue by just replying to the email/notification. Turned out to be a simple configuration change, but in the long run I do not know if we shouldn't adjust the code a little bit more. So I may open a pull-request to change a bit the behavior there. We also had a new contributor set up his environment and working on an easyfix (PR incoming soon) and together with Matt Prahl we worked on a couple of pull-requests to get the tests running and behave as expected.

After that I attended the presentation about fedora-hubs. Having been involved in the early stages of the project it was nice to see where it is now and to see that it is in good hands!

I then attended the presentation about the Fedora Magazine which was quite interesting and explained how the editorial board works and plan the articles or work with the authors writing them.

The last presentation I attended was from Will Woods and was really interesting. I will likely going to butcher the ideas he presented, but it was about a R&D project he has been working on trying to improve the situation around composing artifacts with RPMs. His findings were that RPM scriptlets are most often the limiting factor and that with some more structure we could improve the situation quite a bit. He showed us the compose of a qcow image being done in less than 30 seconds and, I quote, "before optimization". This sounds really quite interesting for the CI work that currently being done, though integrating both project is likely a long term idea.

The day ended with a game night with pizzas and drinks allowing us to spend time and chat about all sorts of things, work-related and not.