Flock time is upon is! This time in lovely Budapest. As always when flock is in europe, it's a long flight for me, but otherwise travel was uneventfull: Drive 2 hours to PDX, then PDX to AMS, then a short layover for coffee and stoupwaffles and then AMS to BUD, and finally a taxi ride to the hotel.

The hotel is quite lovely. It's right next to the danube river and has a nice view. The AC is working nicely too (it's quite hot outside here right now). After getting into the hotel yesterday and a quick dinner at a very nice place down the road, I managed to sleep for 10+ hours.

A nice complementary breakfast, then flock. I went to:

• The FPLs yearly talk on the state of Fedora. This went over a lot of decisions and changes the Fedora Council made early this year around mission and how to better try and acheive and articulate our goals. Then some nice charts and graphs, and finally a bunch of things for us to ponder on how to solve.
• Next up was a coffee break. I Love that we have these scheduled, it's a great chance to visit with fellow fedorians.
• The next big talk in the main room was Cate Huston from wordpress talking about how we all fail at projects and some things to try and fail less. It was a nice talk. Lots to think about, and definitely some things that resonated.
• Final talk in the big room for the day was from the Facebook desktop support team about them rolling Fedora out as a supported desktop for their users. They went over their setup, some problems/issues they hope to work with Fedora to solve and took questions. Very interesting.
• Nice lunch in the hotel resturant, then back to flock...
• I went then to the Improving the Packaging Experience with automation. Some great ideas there, we just need people to try and drive them and spend some cycles working on them.
• Then on to the Fedora Workstation status update and progress. Lots of great stuff here, most of which I knew, but it was great seeing all the progress in one place. Keep up the great work!
• The next few timeslots I got pulled into the "hallway" track. ie, discussions with friends and co-workers and community members (and sometimes all 3 in one person!).
• Next I went to Ben Cotton's session on changing the changes process. I think the changes he wants to do will help out and make things run smoother. He had a nice overview of changes and there was a good bit of discussion with the audience.
• I sadly missed the "slideshow kareoke" session as I stopped to talk to people.
• The nights event was board games and relaxing, so we gathered up everyone from the CPE team that was there and had a very nice group dinner at a local place.
• Then, back to the hotel and time to sleep...

The next day started out with a "Fedora, Red Hat, and IBM" talk from Denise Dumas. I've heard most of the content before, but she put a nice Fedora spin on things.

• Next up I went to a panel talk lead by Brendan Conoboy about how RHEL8 was formed and where and why it diverged from Fedora. Not surprisingly, we want to try and merge things back as closely as we can to make RHEL9 smoother.
• Lubomír Sedlář's talk on making composes faster was definitely something I had to attend. In addition to the ideas he had, the audience suggested a few more and I hope everyone went away with a good understanding of how composes are made.
• Leigh Griffin had a nice talk about my team (CPE) trying to become more agile. I really like his approach to find what works for us and not just apppoint a scrum master and make everyone go through some ceremonies. What we end up with will depend on what we want and how we work, there's no one-size-fits-all.
• Laura Abbot gave a talk about the kernel tree of the future. There's a lot of will to move things to a better workflow than they are today. I hope they can get it to a nice place with some hard work.
• Finally up at the end of the day was my 25min communishift talk. The room was packed and there were tons of questions (which I hope I answered). Communishift is out community openshift cluster for Proof of concepts, development, tinkering or the like from the community. We are only responsible for the platform, users are responsible for everything above that. It seemed to get a lot of good feedback.
• The evening event was a dinner boat ride on the river. The dinner and the boat and the company was great. There was a bit too much walking to get there in the heat, but we all survived.

Saturday started off with a showcase from the outreachy and google summer of code projects. It was awesome to see some of the projects they had worked on and the progress they had made. great stuff!

• Most of the rest of saturday I spent talking to people and discussing ideas or problems. Got a lot of requests to add people to communishift, which I did later that night.

Sunday started off with a CPE hackfest. I worked it like a barcamp, so we tossed out ideas and topics of things we wanted to go over and voted on them. The top two were: "going over backlog of projects" and "improving the packager experience". We split the room into two and started working away.

• We got a ton of requirements / needs for a new monitoring / metrics setup. There was a lot of good discussion from people not on our team, but interacting with us on what they might want/need.
• There was some discussion about how to try and move forward on our next generation account system. Stay tuned here there's several good ideas being explored.
• I finally got to talk to the copr folks and come up with some plans to move copr forward from being on our old cloud. Should be some good movement in this area soon I hope.
• We got some progress on the CPE docs. Fixed some things and got them generating as we push changes to them.
• After lunch we had the "meet your FESCo" panel. There were lots of questions and I hope a good discussion. Everyone got some good mic time and it went pretty well.
• Finally the wrap up session, everyone who lead a session came up and gave a short overview. It was great to hear this for the sessions I couldn't attend. Finally there was a SUPER great video made by tatica of a bunch of people at flock. We really are a diverse bunch.
• Sunday night I had a final dinner with the team and then up at 4am to head home. Left the hotel at 4am, got home about 3pm the same day (and a ton of time zone changes in the way).

All in all another great flock in the books. This one seemed to have more energy / excited folks than I have seen in a while, and as always it was good to see old friends. Until next year!