Another Flock to Fedora conference has come and gone, and like last year, this one was held in Prague. Unlike last year, I was not in the middle of moving across the country (again) so I was able to attend, thanks to my employer.

As always, it was great to see so many familiar faces and meet new folks face-to-face. To those of you who weren’t able to make it, you were missed. And, as always, I spent a lot of time in the hallway track talking to people, getting a sense of what everyone was working on and interested in.

Day -1

The day before the conference started, there was a sponsorship dinner. Although Bex did all the work getting the paperwork to the correct people at Microsoft, he wasn’t able to make it to Prague in time for the dinner so I was sent. I arrived on Saturday morning after a quick connection through Dublin, which gave me plenty of time to get settled in and resist taking a nap. I spent the dinner chatting with Kevin Fenzi and Jef Spaleta, and while I can’t remember all the topics, curling was definitely mentioned.

Day 0

I volunteered to help at the check-in desk the morning of the first day, which I felt went very smoothly (the new label makers were a nice addition). It was nice to help out, but it was also a great way to match names I’ve seen on Matrix to faces as folks arrived. After my shift, I got sucked into the hallway track until lunch.

After lunch and a bit more hallway track, I went to the “PR-based Gating for Fedora: Can We Make It Work?” workshop from František Lachman. There was a lot of discussion in and around the Fedora contribution workflow which I have lots of thoughts about, but I felt there was a rather widespread desire to make things better (even if the exact way we do that isn’t clear). Lots of people who were not me brought up keeping the specfiles in one repository rather than forty thousand or however many git repositories we’re up to. In any case, I’d really like a nice pull request workflow for Fedora where I can’t mess up updates, and where we can all share the tooling we build around packaging.

I spent the rest of the day in the hallway track, doing some last minute preparations for my talk on signing, and preparing for the joint Microsoft talk with Reuben and Bex. I was happy to meet some of the Red Hat folks working on cryptography and signing, and I’m hopefully somewhere down the line we can all do approximately the same thing for signing content.

I got dinner with Bex and Reuben at some place that served North Carolina style BBQ, and it was pretty good (especially with kimchi on top!).

Day 1

This was the first day of recorded presentations. I went to the usual “State of Fedora” address, followed by the Fedora Council and FESCo panels. I thought it was interesting (but sadly unsurprising) to see downward trend of contributors, and I’d be interested to see a further breakdown of who’s leaving. I have plenty of not-backed-by-hard-data ideas about why this is happening, but I do hope it leads to a stronger focus on (and acceptance of) improving the contribution experience - the general feeling in the hallways, as I mentioned earlier, makes me somewhat optimistic.

After lunch and a bit of hallway track, I went to the “Secure by Design: Aligning Fedora with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)” workshop by Jaroslav Řezník and Roman Zhukov. A good portion of it was a run down of what the CRA entailed and how the roles it describes map into Fedora. After that I spent a bit of time preparing for my talk. My talk went well, I think, except the live demo didn’t entirely work (gpg2 + gpg-agent + gnupg-pkcs11-scd is very finicky and I forgot a setup step). With that stressful event out of the way, I was able to relax a bit at the dinner party, chat with numerous folks, and fill up on the “appetizers” they brought out in vast quantities. Big props to the event organizers, the weather was great and I really appreciated the open space and variety of food options.

Day 2

It was hard to believe it was already the final day of the conference, but I think at this point I was also feeling pretty worn out. I went to Justin’s “State of the Fedora Kernel” talk, and was glad to hear that the GitLab workflow I helped build before I left wasn’t absolutely terrible. I made some last minute edits to the slides for our “Two Years In: Accelerating Microsoft Contributions to Fedora” talk (where I was happy to have Bex and Reuben do most of the talking), then helped present that talk. Afterwards I went to the “What’s new in Fedora CoreOS” talk and managed to chat with Jean-Baptiste Trystram and Joel Capitao about signing and Konflux, which we’ll hopefully get sorted out in the next couple weeks (in the staging environment, anyway). Hopefully we’ll also be able to get Fedora CoreOS images into the Azure community gallery alongside the Cloud images.

The lightning talks were all enjoyable, and I’m really impressed some folks even managed to make up slides for theirs and nothing went terribly wrong (great work everyone). There was time for a bit more hallway track, and then I went to the Contributor Recognition Program, which concluded the presentations for Flock 2026. I spent the evening catching up with old and new friends, chatting about ideas on improving various bits of Fedora infrastructure, and how to make the contributor experience better. People were already leaving for DevConf (or home) at this point, so if I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, I’m sorry and I hope we’ll see each other next year!

Day 3

It was an uneventful trip back home, thankfully.

I’m looking forward to put all the work I’ve done on improving Fedora’s signing infrastructure through its paces, to get support for PQC done, and I have a few ideas on what to work on next. Hopefully some of them work out and don’t lead to too many people screaming at me. Flock is a great event to get excited about the next year of work and to test the waters on wild ideas, so I’m really glad I was able to make it this year.