This past weekend was great; I met a lot of people I've only seen in IRC or on mailing lists, hacked on MyFedora (mockup) a bunch, attended and filmed a bunch of sessions, and just tried to get some of the "Fedora vibe" and see how everyone interacts.
Todd and I arrived at the hotel late Thursday night, around 22:30. We visited the lobby for a bit to see if any Fedorites where there, but there weren't. I informed Todd about the dress code for the NCSU State Club and we promptly decided to hit Walmart. Unfortunately, they closed at 23:00 so we were SOL for the night. Back to the room to hang out on IRC for a bit and sleep.
Up early Friday to get breakfast and pants at Walmart. The State Club at NCSU was an awesome place; I should have pictures up soon, hopefully. While there were a number of sessions going on, I ended up in the Fedora Infrastructure room working on MyFedora with John (J5) Palmieri, Luke Macken, and Toshio Kuratomi. My python's not nearly as good as my PHP (mostly just lack of understanding basic structures and what classes are available), but I was able to pickup enough about the TurboGears framework they were using to get the widget configuration written and aide in the basic design of the RSS widget so that we can write new widgets in only 3 lines of code!. I was really surprised at the number of people that turned out for the hackfest, and apparently so was Fedora; at 78 people total, it was over twice what they were expecting and had planned for lunch! The staff at the State Club were great, though; the food was excellent as well.
Friday evening Todd and I went out with a large group to eat and sat down with Kevin Fenzi and his girlfriend. Afterward we all went back to the hotel bar to hang out with a bunch of other Fedorians.
Saturday was the Barcamp and was I was surprised to see how many showed up for this event. Max's opening State of Fedora address was great; it was very nice to get insight from someone that has to have a high overview of what Fedora has done and where it is going. He also announced Paul Frields taking over, and even from the little I was able to see of him, it looks like we'll be in good hands.
I managed to get to about 4 sessions out of the various blocks throughout the day. Everyone attended Michael Tiemann’s talk on “Fedora in the Enterprise" which turned out to be a great discussion on how enterprises can and need to contribute to the open source process. Next I attended Mike McGrath's talk on Fedora Infrastructure and how they're both similar and different from your regular IT shop. After lunch (provided by Fedora) I hit up the MyFedora talk lead by John, then decided to take a break and hang out in the big room while the Cobbler talk was going on. I picked up at the end of Seth Vidal's talk on Yum/CreateRepo to ask about "suggested packages". I was glad to hear that they've definitely have though of this, and while there are some technical problems (RPM would need to support it) it's more of a problem of "how do we present this to the user". I'll definitely have to keep an eye on this and see if any of the other upcoming technologies like PackageKit could help frame this any better. My last session for the day was the TurboGears talk by Luke. Out of all those sessions, I managed to film the State of Fedora address, Fedora in the Enterprise, Fedora Infrastructure, MyFedora, and the TurboGears sessions - I have some transcoding to do, it seems ;-)
Saturday night was FUDPub; first at the Flying Saucer where Fedora bought the first round (thanks!) and then onto a couple other bars; one with karaoke, one without. I mostly avoided the karaoke one and hung out with people at the other one (I can't remember either bar's names).
We arrived a bit late to Sunday's hackfest; I got to work on MyFedora again and almost managed to get user-to-widget associations saving. Well, actually, I think that part works, but there's some minor detail about restoring the widgets. Sunday wasn't nearly as productive as I would have liked, but with people running around trying to rebook cancelled flights and exhausted from such a great weekend, it's not surprising.
We ended up leaving around 14:00 and got back to my place about 20:45. Long drive, but the trip was definitely worth it to meet all the people and learn lots of new things; most of which I probably am not even aware of yet. Here's to another great year for Fedora!
