Flock 2026 and Devconf.cz 2026 trip report

Long time no blog, once again - as always, I'm mostly posting on Mastodon now, so follow there if you're missing the Content. This is a bit big, though, so it goes here!

I was in Prague for Flock 2026 and Brno for Devconf.cz 2026 recently. Didn't have any issues with travel, fortunately. I was in Prague a day early for a Red Hat "face-to-face", which went fine. Had a fairly quiet/jetlagged dinner with Kevin and Tomas on the first night, and a nice dinner with Lenka Segura, Kashyap Chamarthy, Cristian Le, Frantisek Lehman and Laura Barcziova on the second night; most of them I was meeting for the first time in person, which is always good.

Flock 2026

Flock started for real the next day with workshops. I started with "The Future of Fedora Atomic", about how we can reach the goal of all the Atomic images being based on a shared bootc base container, then went to "Forging Fedora Project’s Future With Forgejo". In the afternoon I went to "PR-based Gating for Fedora: Can We Make It Work?", which was about the idea of moving all automated testing/gating to run against dist-git pull requests (instead of mainly against updates, as is the current case).

These were all more "talking shops" than "workshops", really, but they at least mostly produced interesting conversations and concrete ideas. In particular, Cristian and I were able to determine a set of priorities for Fedora CI from the "PR-based gating" session - there was a lot of discussion of potential issues and concerns further down the road of the potential migration, but in the end we found it pretty clear that we need to improve the reliability of the existing tests and pipelines, and the ease of interpreting the results, and that's uncontroversial work that can be done first.

There was also a request from Petr Khartskhaev that we make it possible to run the openQA tests on dist-git pull requests. This had already been requested by Mo Duffy before. I've resisted doing this for all dist-git pull requests because I know at least some would fail when changes to multiple packages need to be grouped and tested together. The update system allows us to group builds into updates, but dist-git does not yet have any way to mark multiple PRs as a logical group for testing/promotion. However, someone suggested a better idea: do it by request, not for all PRs automatically. So I decided to go ahead and do it. Instead of doing another workshop, I hid in the corner of the "Languages in Floss" session and bodged up a working prototype, which is deployed to staging openQA. If you comment /openqa test on a dist-git pull request, tests on it will run in staging openQA. I'm currently working on getting the results reliably reported back to the pull request.

We had a team dinner that evening, again good to meet people and a good mix of work and social chat. At some point in there I met our relatively new RH team member Jaroslav Groman in-person for the first time, which was great - he's been doing excellent work on digging out from under our tooling tech debt and it's great to have him aboard. Peter Sklenar unfortunately wasn't able to come this time.

Day two was session heavy. There was an opening keynote track with Jef's "State of Fedora" address, live Fedora Council and FESCo meetings (effectively), and a Hummingbird talk from Stef Walter. The State of Fedora produced a couple of very talked-about sets of statistics, one showing Fedora (and friends) usage climbing solidly and one showing Fedora contributor numbers declining worryingly. The usage numbers are great, of course - especially the rapidly-growing numbers for KDE and our awesome downstream distro friends (the uBlue-verse, Asahi, Bazzite et. al.) We definitely need to dig into the contributor numbers some more, see what's going on, and whether and what we need to do to reverse the trend. There are a lot of interesting questions about whether it's Red Hatters, community maintainers, or both who are declining, and how this relates to other trends like the AVC tsunami, mushrooming language ecosystems, the rise of Flatpaks / Snaps / AppImages and so on.

The Council and FESCo sessions touched on those topics and several others, though interestingly not the AI Desktop proposal which I was kinda expecting to hear a lot about. I kinda tuned out and hacked through some of them to be honest. Stef's talk gave a good clear overview of Hummingbird - I kinda knew it going in, but it's always good to have it summarized quickly and clearly (at least I thought so).

I unfortunately didn't know about the Lunch and Learns (somehow missed them on the schedule), or else I would have gone to some! But still had plenty of fun/productive lunches with various folks. In particular I met Vít Smolík (smoliicek) in person, which was great. He's been helping out with the data team and infrastructure team and is doing some great work.

In the afternoon I went to the "Packit and Fedora: The CI Story Continues" talk, which was a good summary of the work to rationalize the mess of different systems we have/had testing pull requests. It's much better than it was before. Then I went to "Fedora Server – What you can expect from the next two releases", which was great because it clearly explained the idea of the "Home Server" spinoff which I hadn't really been clear on. And of course it was good to see Peter Boy and Emmanuel Seyman again. Alexander Bokovoy also explained his latest authentication stuff, which as always I didn't entirely understand but filed under "sounds like Alexander has it under control"...

I skipped another session to do some hacking, then went to "The Engineer’s Guide to Design", which was really interesting - I like going to slightly off-the-beaten-path talks. I don't really work on front-end UX stuff a lot, but it was still interesting to hear a perspective from someone who's been both an engineer and a designer on the impedance mismatches that can happen and the basic concepts it's useful for both sides to know about the other. Then I saw "Artifact Signing in Fedora", where Jeremy Cline gave some background and an overview of his ongoing project to rewrite the Fedora signing server, which is badly-needed work that we're really grateful for.

In the evening we had the official party, at a really nice outdoor food court with a reserved space for the conference. The organizers brought over so many appetizers I barely needed to use the meal ticket, but managed to force down some tacos nevertheless. Had a great time chatting with various folks, then later headed to a Belgian beer bar for more drinks with Justin Forbes and several others.

On the final day I started with "The Packager's Guide to openQA Failures" of course - Lukas Ruzicka (my openQA henchman) did a great job covering openQA failure analysis from the perspective of a packager, and I contributed a few notes here and there. We had a good crowd who seemed really interested, which is always great news. After that I saw Kevin Fenzi's "scrapers gotta scrape scrape scrape" talk on all the fun we've been having with scraper networks flooding our infrastructure. I know some but not all of it beforehand, and of course Kevin explained it well and the audience was very engaged. Plus I got to tell my story about the time I thought a dastardly new scraper network had figured out how to evade Anubis, but it turned out that the call was coming from inside the house (i.e. I had done a slightly silly thing in openQA which made it effectively DoS Koji...)

After the coffee break I saw "Fedora Test Days - a11y", which was actually a somewhat wider talk from a couple of RH folks working on accessibility testing about their current testing and future plans. It was really interesting and it was good to be able to speak with them briefly about the possibilities of using openQA for this. I stayed in the same room for "Two Years In: Accelerating Microsoft Contribution to Fedora", where Jeremy Cline, Brian Exelbierd and Reuben Olinsky covered some Microsoft's (much-welcomed) contributions to Fedora and also some stuff about Azure Linux.

After that was "Upgrading Fedora Infrastructure from Nagios to Zabbix" - this migration has been ongoing for a while but was much-needed as a modernization and also a better architecture. I found it very useful as I do have plans to add more detailed monitoring of openQA and the talk was very helpful in letting me know how to get started with that.

After lunch came lightning talks. I had proposed one about "new stuff we did in Fedora CI lately", which kinda overlapped with some of the full-length talks in the end, but it still got a lot of votes, so Cristian Le and I went up second and did a rapid redux of the Packit consolidation work, improved result displays, optimizations and improvements to the generic tests, addition of rmdepcheck and so on. My voice was giving out by this point but we just about got through it. There were a lot of other great talks and everyone managed to come in under time, which was impressive.

After that was a Fedora Mindshare session which I half-followed and half-hacked/dozed through (was starting to get tired at this point!), then the "Fedora’s Contributor Recognition Program" session where much-deserved awards were handed out to Ankur Sinha, Fabio Valentini and Justin Forbes. I was on the voting panel for this so it was great to see the culmination, and the trophies contributed by the Nairobi GNU/Linux Users Group were awesome.

I almost forgot to mention the whole time I was struggling with some sort of wifi driver bug - it seems there was a troublesome AP or something at the hotel which caused my laptop to crash constantly. And the hotel wifi was terrible, and I only had 5GB of data on my phone, so I couldn't really rebase to F44 to avoid it. Lots of fun.

Devconf.cz 2026

That was the end of Flock; things wound down and I had dinner with...some people...somewhere (possibly the third Vietnamese of the trip? Things are getting fuzzy). The next day was a welcome quiet day traveling from Prague to Brno - train and bus, no problem except waiting for the bus was very hot. I stayed at the Hotel Vaka, which I've never been at before, but it's quite nice. The whole event was a bit weird because Moto GP (the motorbike equivalent of Formula 1) moved their Brno race to the same weekend Devconf.cz would usually be on, and took all the hotels, so devconf was hastily moved to Thursday/Friday. Hotels were still hard to get and I only just managed to grab this one at a decent rate. I was able to rebase my laptop finally and stop worrying about wifi crashes, and had a nice quiet pizza dinner at Doe Boy.

So a shortened devconf started with the opening session, then another Hummingbird keynote, this time with Valentin Rothberg as well as Stef Walter. It added a bit of detail compared to Stef's Flock talk, and there wasn't anything else on. Then I saw "OpenShift CI: What if we stopped retesting everything all the time?", which was an interesting talk about the tradeoffs involved in doing automatic retests of complex merge chains in a big project with lots of PRs trying to be merged all the time (OpenShift). It wasn't directly applicable to anything I do, exactly - Fedora updates don't quite map to PRs in a git repo - but in a more general sense it was useful in suggesting methods for thinking about this kind of complex tradeoff and how to measure the impact and efficiency of testing processes.

Next I saw David Duncan's "From Laptop Chaos to Fedora Cloud: Quadlets and Containers", mainly because it was David, but it turned out to be a good talk about a way to make a relatively complex multi-container side project buildable and deployable the same way on your laptop and in The Cloud, using systemd quadlets. I've dealt with this general area before a few times. David made a solid case that quadlets are a good approach, in his usual fun and personable style.

After that I saw Zbigniew's "New security features in systemd" - honestly I missed some of this one, but got the gist of why systemd is trying to modernize various mechanisms here. Then I went to "Beyond the Screen: A Deep Dive into Linux Accessibility for Developers" by Vojtech Polasek, which was one of my highlights of the week - a really good explanation of how computer interaction really works for blind people, and what properties applications should have (and avoid) to make them usable. This is obviously very important for testing purposes.

Next I went to "Stop Looking for the Perfect Prompt: The Design-First Workflow for Coding Agents" to get my corporate mandatory minimum AI Content(tm) - it was actually a pretty good and accessible talk on different approaches to LLM-based feature development. I still don't really use LLM code generation heavily (for a start, I spend so little time actually sitting at a blank screen typing significant amounts of code that it's not really worth worrying about), but it's good to keep up with the latest ideas about how to do this kinda thing. Continuing with the AI theme I took in Tomas Tomecek and Laura Barcziova's "How AI helped us ship updates in a Linux distro", which was a practical talk on the system behind Hummingbird and the actual approach it takes to (sort-of) AI-driven package builds.

After that I think I did some Fedora booth cover for a while. Lukas Ruzicka and Vojtech Trefny were holding the booth down for most of the weekend, but I stopped by and did an hour here and there to give them some relief. It's always a lot of fun chatting to people about Fedora, other distributions or stuff that has nothing to do with Linux at all. Lukas had set up a Framework laptop with a MIDI keyboard attached to show off that it's pretty practical to do audio creation on stock Fedora kernel and audio stack these days; Vojtech and I had absolutely no idea how to use it, so we had lots of fun trying to talk about it to people and eventually telling them to come back when Lukas would be there...

In the evening we had the conference party, which was at the same outdoor swimming pool it's been at for a couple of years(?) now. It's a great venue - you can grab some food and a drink and then relax in the shade under some trees. I wound up sitting round with a really interesting mixed group of folks (Red Hat and non-Red Hat, some big cheeses, some medium-size cheeses and some fresh faced...cheese curds? Help, my metaphor is falling apart) most of the night, it was a great evening. Walked back most of the way to the hotel with Stef Walter, setting the world to rights as is the tradition after a few drinks at conference parties...

On the second day I started with "From Podman to Production: Building Trusted Container Images with Konflux on OpenShift" by Vladimir Sokolenko, which was probably the most understandable and useful Konflux talk I've seen so far. I think I then maybe did a bit more booth cover(?) and some hacking, then wrapped up with a nice three-talk track in the same room - "Identical Testing Environments from Laptop to CI with tmt and Testing Farm" by Cristian and Petr Šplíchal (covering their work to make tests more reproducible from Testing Farm to your local system), "systemd-sysext in Production: What We Learned Extending /usr Without a Package Manager" by Brian Exelbierd and Daniel Zaťovič (a really good retrospective on their experience using sysext in the real world to ship additional / alternative software on Flatcar), and "Local package layering on bootc systems with DNF5" by Evan Goode (explaining his design and plans for providing a convenient, dnf-ish interface to "overlaying" packages on bootc-based installs). I met Evan in person for the first time at the party, and it was great talking to him. I hope his work on this goes well - we really need it for the glorious bootc-based future.

After that was the traditional wrap-up session with the trivia quiz (I won a t-shirt!) and then I said bye to a lot of people and melted off (it was extremely hot) to the train station...to find that my train to Vienna was delayed by nearly an hour. Ah, well. Eventually made it to my hotel in Vienna (which was incredibly nice, just wish I'd stayed there longer...) and had an excellent dinner at Iki (highly recommended if you're in the area). Got in a couple of swims in the nice-but-small hotel pool before and after sleeping, then had a Vienna take on avocado toast (interesting!) for breakfast and headed off to the airport, and that was another trip in the books.