So I finally made it to my first Fedora Conference. I was able to swing by Rochester for Fedora FLOCK between 28th August to the 30th of August and make most of the conference. So the conference started very grass roots and continued that way. everything was free/complimentary, lunches, t-shirt and conference ticket. Which left a decent amount to be able to cover the hotel room and stay in the conference hotel which made everything that so much easier for catching up with people and meeting new fedora faces.
So most people know me as a Debian fangirl, however I do and have used Redhat/Fedora/Centos and in the past few years I had the pleasure of meeting more and more faces from these communities and RedHat. In the past bit I have been using fedora as my main Linux desktop distro more and more because of how nice the GNOME GTK bindings are in Fedora. Now I am not saying that Debian with GNOME is not as nice, its just when it comes to the leading bleeding edge of change on the desktop for Linux I find Fedora is the best Distro. It might have something to do with the fact that RedHat has pulled together and pays and amazing team to support Fedora, and of course all the volunteers who work tirelessly night after night for free on Fedora 😉 but for whatever reason you can not deny that Fedora is and has been where its at for Linux Desktop.
There is so much I can say about FLOCK, first WOW, I could not believe the quality of food and speakers. One of the highlights was meeting the creator of OpenShift and hearing all about the prototype which was written in PHP I might add, however this did quickly change. Deep dive engineering talks about how we approach PaaS and SaaS software architecture. Problems faced in Fedora kernel and community and discussions on how these can be addressed. Evenings full of great dinners, beers and Linux chats with amazing minds. Oh and did I mention an evening in the Toy Museum in Rochester which was an awesome way for me to sign off a great conference. I think we ended up overstaying at the museum slightly playing on the PacMan challenge arcade game.
On my final day the keynote speaker was a Dr who had created a 3D printed arm for children without their limb. This guy was amazing, I had heard people talk about this before but this is the first time I had actually seen someone go hey you know what we can OpenSource all these patterns and get the kids to design their own. He also brought one of his patients in a young man who had helped in designing his arm and was therefore able to customise it for his individual needs.
All and all an amazing conference, the Fedora community is awesome this I knew already but as I said this was my first big conference with just Fedora people and I am still an outsider persay even though I have bee on the fringes for years apart from the work I did at OLPC I have not contributed any code as an individual on the project, so you are never quite sure how a community will embrace you. But Fedora was amazing and thanks RedHat for sponsoring and supporting Fedora and the community.