Flock is the new name for the old FUDCon Conference, where the Fedora contributors FLOCK together and discuss new ideas, projects and the general direction Fedora is headed in. I attended the Flock Conference held at Charleston, South Carolina between Aug 9th - Aug 11th. This was my first Fedora Conference and my first time in Charleston, so I was double Excited!!
The Conference opened with a Keynote from the current Fedora Project's Leader: Robyn Bergeron. Me being a sporadic contributor to Fedora, was a bit taken aback to learn that Fedora is used by quite a bit in production, yes PRODUCTION!!!. The primary pitch at this keynote was to push for a bigger footprint of Fedora in Production environments. When you consider it, it is really tough to maintain the software at bleeding edge and provide the stability a production environment expects. I was really happy to learn Fedora is doing it... AWESOME!!!
Some other interesting sessions I attended:
Dan Walsh's 'State of Fedora security' where Dan walked through some of his blog entries detailing new security features that are cooked and being cooked into new Fedora releases. His blog will definitely be added to my RSS subscriptions. I also got to attend some interesting sessions about Kernel Bug Triaging, Kernel Fuzz testing by Kernel Maintainers on Fedora.
I attended the Rasberry Pi and btrfs sessions too. I paid little attention to these technologies till now, so these sessions were a good learning experience for me. I also got to play around with Openstack software at the OpenStack Test Event. The experience on Fedora has been rather smooth, everything (except the web interface) just worked the moment the installation completed :).
The sessions that really caught my attention were 'HyperScale Cloud Management' by Chris Tyler and 'Lulzbot Keynote' about 3D printing by Aeva Palecek. The Hyperscale session introduced me to SoC (System on a Chip) configuration and opportunities for optimization of tasks like OS Deployment, Remote Management with BMC/SC (Service Processor), De-duplication in N/w Layer etc in Hyper Scale Environments. I was new to 3D printing world too and was more than happy to be introduced to it. It is really amazing how the 3D printer companies are pushing their proprietary software to Linux distributions and that Fedora is the first and the only major distribution to have all the required software components.
Conferences like Flock provide a good platform to introduce new technologies and provide distilled information about existing technologies to users. This will save users from pouring through a ton of docs/source code!!, always a welcome trend. In the evenings, I got to walk around in the Historic Down town of Charleston and also paid visits to Isle of Palms, Waterfront Park in Charleston.
All in all it was a good trip !! Hopefully, I will get to attend more of these conferences.