Tag: CPE

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The Community Platform Engineering F2F 2023 Experience – Part II

20 Mar 2023 – 23 Mar 2023

– Barcelona, Spain

Intro

If you have not already – now is the best time to read through the first part of the event report before getting into the second part here.

From left to right – Actually, never mind – there are too many people there.

Day 2
Wednesday, 22nd March 2023
The team members decided to start a bit late on the second day to ensure that everyone gets enough rest after the adventurous first day. Once the joint breakfast was completed in the hotel restaurant, the members started heading off to the office by 10 in the morning. They were were gracefully served Catalonian snacks by Lenka Segura, Japanese souvenirs by David Kirwan, and German sweets by Julia Bley for the duration of the meeting. Matthew Miller started the second day with his talk about the Fedora Project strategy and how Community Platform Engineering fits into the picture. This talk was followed by the one by Tomas Hrcka about how the Fedora Release Engineering team addresses its responsibilities. The team took a short break after the first couple of sessions, before heading into the next set.

From left to right – Lenka Segura Matthew Miller Adam Samalik Troy Dawson

After a short break, the team continued with three lightning talks delivered about OpenShift operators by David Kirwan, Packit by Frantisek Lachman and Laura Barcziova, and Pulp by Miroslav Suchy. Miroslav Suchy delivered a thought-provoking talk about the scope of tooling for the Community Platform Engineering team, and how it contributes to Fedora Linux. With that, the folks dispersed into small groups for lunch. Once they were back in the office, Hunor Csomortáni delivered a talk about revisiting source-git and the plans for unifying package sources in the pipeline. This was followed by a talk by Carl George about the EPEL 10 plans for improvements that would be coming very soon. The final interesting talk of the day was delivered by Brian Stinson about the expectations of RHEL from Fedora Linux and CentOS Stream.

From left to right – Emma Kidney David Fan Michal Konecny Akashdeep Dhar Samyak Jain David Kirwan

In the evening, at around 19:00, the team members left for a regional burger restaurant, Tio Joe’s. This had been booked in advance and was near the hotel premises . With toasts made to the team members that were now united after a long time, they not only enjoyed the appetizing food that was served but also the company of the friends that they had bonded with over the course of the last couple days.

Once the dinner was over, at around 21:30, some folks headed back to the hotel for a respite. The remainder went to the Trompos Karaoke Bar to participate in the fun karaoke night session organized by Aurelien Bompard. People queued up their songs and soon began to collaborate in performing their favorite songs in duos and in choirs. This was a fitting end to the night, as late as 02:00, and a fun look at their singing preferences.

Day 3
Thursday, 23rd March 2023

This was the day of departure for a lot of people. Since they would miss out on the sessions on this third day, it was incredibly light in terms of the agenda and activities. Many of the team members checked out of their hotel rooms after breakfast at 09:00 and left their luggage with the hotel before leaving for the office.

Stefan Mattejiet started off the last day with his discussion session about CPE Futurespective, and understanding what direction the team should head in the coming times. The interesting discussion felt a lot inspired by the established logic model planning structure used for Fedora Council community initiatives. This structure starts off with planning the general objectives first and then going back to the implementation details later. 

From left to right – Fabian Arrotin James Antill Adam Saleh Carl George Tomas Hrcka

The next session was hosted by Aoife Moloney who kicked off an interesting discussion about the limited-scope projects that the team undertakes and the maintainers for the applications that the team takes care of. The members participated in pointing out the things that currently work great and those that could use some improvements. This was the last planned session for the day and the group assembled to be a part of the “Community Platform Engineering family picture”. After that, they dispersed into small groups to have their lunches in their preferred places.

With no more planned talks after lunchtime, the team members were divided into smaller groups for breakout rooms to participate in more detailed discussions. Michal Konecny lead the one for the infrastructure and release engineering team. 

From left to right – Michal Konecny Carl George Akashdeep Dhar David Kirwan Nils Philippsen Fabian Arrotin Troy Dawson Diego Herrera

The team started slowly thinning down even more in the late afternoon, with the members bidding farewell to each other in the office and returning to the hotel. Some members decided to stay longer to explore Barcelona a bit more. Others began collecting their luggage from the hotel and leaving for the airport. With “goodbyes” waved to teammates and “resolves” about the next thing, the members departed from the face-to-face meeting with a new zeal and energy to contribute in an even better way to the community.

Even with minor hiccups and some teammates not being able to join the event, the meeting event turned out to be a grand success – both in uniting the members and in strategizing the team’s efforts. The members of the team surely look forward to the next time they get together. 

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The Community Platform Engineering F2F 2023 Experience – Part I

20 Mar 2023 – 23 Mar 2023

Barcelona, Spain

Intro

The Community Platform Engineering team is a Red Hat-sponsored team dedicated to the Fedora Project and CentOS Project that contributes to developing limited-scoped projects called initiatives, maintaining the community infrastructure, and helping manage releases of our offerings. As a remote-only team, the members were unable to get many opportunities to strategize the next big thing as a team and to bond with their fellow teammates beyond the scope of the designated work. Owing to the fact that the last team face-to-face meeting took place in Waterford City, Ireland in 2019, it became necessary for the team to meet up again when the travel restrictions started loosening up. After all, the popular saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” applies to everyone — even to community members and teammates, right?

Barcelona, Spain was selected as the destination for the team face-to-face meeting and the duration was picked to be from 20th March 2023 to 23rd March 2023. As this was going to be one of the first times that people started embarking on travels again after a long spell of inactivity during COVID-19, the management made sure to begin the travel planning and event management well in advance to account for everyone in the team. This was no small feat to achieve considering the fact that the team had grown significantly since the last team face-to-face meeting; both in terms of member counts and scope diversity. The common accommodation point was chosen to be Hotel Abba Balmoral, Barcelona for the entire team, which is located at the very heart of the city and around a walking distance from the nearest Red Hat office.

Day 0

Whilst a few team members flew into Barcelona on Sunday, many flew in throughout the day and took a cab to the hotel on Monday. As nothing was planned on the agenda for the day, it was spent by the teammates mostly getting to know each other, snacking on regional delicacies, and resting after the long flights people had gone through to get here. It was surprising to see just how many team members were getting to meet each other for the first time here and could not before, either because they were new to the team or were working on greatly different things. Some members decided to recce the Red Hat office located close by to the hotel at Travessera de Garcia, Barcelona, and snacking joints while others decided to rest up during the afternoon before heading together to the planned dinner at 1930 in a local Indian restaurant.

From left to right – Diego Herrera, Nils Philippsen, Michal Konecny, Troy Dawson, Pedro Moura, Stefan Mattejiet, and Akashdeep Dhar

With the evening finding its way into the day, the team united at the hotel lobby at 1900 and started heading over to the authentic Indian restaurant called Bar Bar, which was again a walking distance from the hotel. Being a cuisine that most of the teammates did not try previously, Akashdeep Dhar volunteered to guide folks through the menu – suggesting delicacies to try (or avoid) based on their preferences of flavor. For a team consisting of members hailing from across a variety of time zones and countries, having food and sharing anecdotes was indeed a magically unifying experience. After the dinner got over, some people stayed back to click pictures with the friends they made, some headed off for some more snacks in a nearby cafe and the remaining folks returned back to the hotel to get some much-needed respite.

Day 1

After the team had a joint breakfast from around 0700 to 0900, the members started heading off to the office in small groups to start off with the first (official) day of the event. Once all members settled down in a meeting room, the face-to-face meeting started off with the opening delivered by Stefan Mattejiet, following which a fun session was conducted to understand how well the members know each other by drawing each other’s faces. The next session was conducted by Akashdeep Dhar where he talked about the importance of mentorship within the team as well as in the community and organized an activity where the team, divided into multiple subteams, were asked to enact different scenarios of mentor-mentee interactions. Following that they dispersed into small groups and headed to their preferred places for lunch.

From left to right – Stephen Gallagher, Aurelien Bompard, Emma Kidney, Akashdeep Dhar, Michal Konecny, Samyak Jain, David Fan and Fabian Arrotin

Once the team members were back in the office, Michal Konecny started off the next session about how knowledge can be effectively shared in the team, which proved to be really helpful. This was added to by the next session conducted jointly by Aoife Moloney, Kevin Fenzi, and Julia Bley, around understanding what the team skills are and what their interests lie in. The members were lining up their creative thoughts as sticky notes that were grouped under a certain focus topic. As we moved on to the later parts of the day, Troy Dawson organized a group story session where we came together to come up with fun stories and it was really surprising to see how creative people could get using just one or two words. Finally, Matthew Miller gave us a brief yet interesting run through the history of 35 Fedora Linux releases in around 35 minutes. 

Matthew Miller giving a run-through of 35 releases of Fedora Linux in 35 minutes

With the last talk having been completed, the team members headed back to the hotel for a brief respite before they reunited again for a touring walk at 1630. When the team got to Plaça de Catalunya, the members were divided into two groups and were provided with a couple of tour guides who took them through the famous historical structures of Barcelona. It was an enriching experience to get to know about the history that led to the creation of these fascinating architectural creations and the team members took plenty of photographs to retain the memories. The tour got over by around 1930 after which the team members went to a local restaurant, Taller de Tapas to enjoy regional Spanish cuisine. A wide variety of mouth-watering Tapas delicacies were served with drinks, culminating the first day of the meeting on a high note.