Fedora @ DevConf.US 2018 Wrap-Up

In August, Tom Callaway, Brian Exelbierd and I attended the first ever DevConf.US 2018, the free and annual conference for upstream open source software projects, sponsored primarily by Red Hat. It took places in Boston University. It is the counterpart to the less new DevConf.IN, the the well-established DevConf.CZ, and the 1 time DevConf containers roadshow.

A quiet moment with Bex at the booth. Photo by Richard Bowen

The event went surprisingly well. Although it largely felt like we were preaching to the choir at this Red Hat centric conference, there were many CentOS users from the CentOS Dojo, Boston University affiliates, FSF members, etc. There was still much to inform attendees about.

Examples of some conversation points were:

• Although some people had heard of modularity, many developers came by who had never heard of it. I learned that I often had to listen to their problems, and prescribe modularity as the solution to the problem. One Node.JS user was particularly excited to see the multiple versions available. He wanted to be able to switch to a new version at his leisure; which is exactly the point (decoupling the lifecycle of the framework from that of the OS.)
• One user came up and said that he is using Fedora a the University of Nairobi, and has students use it. He said there is lots of local talent in Kenya for Fedora, so the enterprise blockchain application for a Kenyan bank being developed on Fedora.
• Some CentOS Dojo attendees had some ideas about better integrating CentOS with Fedora.

The booth with lots of SWAG. Even headphones originally from Flock.

I also attended the CentOS Dojo beforehand. I gave an unplanned lightning talk on how to speed up Ansible provisioning of CentOS 7 workstations. The advice also applies to Fedora.

Thank you very much to Spot & Bex for helping out with the booth.

Closing ceremony. Chewbacca did not receive a medal.

I'll end this post with a funny story about the photos below. At the end of DevConf.US, we got to pick up free swag based on successfully answering trivia questions. It became surprisingly cold for a mid-August day, so I picked a rain jacket out of necessity. Rather than saying "Red Hat" on it, a Red Hat product name, or a community open source project name, it says"Red Hat PnT DevOps". Somebody commented that at Red Hat's Westford office, they just raided closets of old swag. (I also picked up an "obsolete design" T-shirt for Foreman.) So I am now effectively wearing a jacket for an internal Red Hat build engineering team while being a community contributor.