There was no way I could have been prepared for the reaction to the Fedora
Badges drop. I've waited this long to
write a Flock recap post because the conference
was so overwhelming that not only did I need a break, I wasn't sure I could
make proper sentences for a while. I'm now going to try.
The Fedora Badges drop was a success. Thank you.
The conference kicked off well, and I was able to put many names to faces. My
talk happened on the morning of the second day. It was ranked highly in the
voting results, so it was held in the auditorium, and there was quite a good
turn out. I got some excellent feedback. Thank you to the transcribers and
videographers who covered my talk. I hope I can get my hands on a recording
soon.
For the remainder of the conference, fellow Fedorians had questions and input
for me almost constantly. I can't count how many times I gave out the link to
the front-end issue tracker
and the Trac instance, the latter
being used to handle the process of reviewing new badge ideas and implementing
them. Thank you to adamw who customized the instance for the review and
implementation process, which he also drafted. Threebean, myself, and others
were overwhelmed in the following days with more emails, notifications, pull
requests, issues, feature requests, and badge submissions than we could
reasonably handle. We were elated, but was incredibly overwhelming. Adamw
kindly reminds me that the response is "indicative of huge success", and while
that may be true, I still needed a breather -- big time.
So, thank you to everyone who made the Fedora Badges drop a success, those
who have contributed to the project, and those who have been handling the
influx of tasks during the past week that I've been mostly off-the-grid
vacationing and moving into the new crib. I'm pleased to see the project
going strong.
Looking back on Flock plans... What got done?
In my previous post, I had a list of things that I hoped would happen
while at Flock. What actually got done?
Flock was indeed awesome.
Fedora Badges slides successfully improved before the drop.
Closed various tickets before and after the drop.
No love was given to Pythong, Predestinate, or Yumwat. :(
The aftermath of Fedora Badges sucked my time dry. Looking
forward to doing this in the coming weeks.
While I learned more about cutting new releases of software
in Fedora-land (Koji builds, pushing to staging and production,
etc.), I didn't sit down and learn how to create a spec file
and RPM. I still want to take the time to do this.
Much less documentation work than I hoped for. Not only did
I want to document the badges stack better, I wanted better
docs for my personal projects. Not much of this happened.
Even though I was mistakenly given an "Attendee" badge
and swag bag rather than the "Speaker" stuff,
Qalthos and spot had my back and got me
me one of the nice Fedora laptop bags anyway. Awesome. :)
Final thoughts about Flock... for now
I had a great time with friends, new and old. The FOSSBox crew was awesome to
Flock with. Evening revelry and hackery was enjoyable as ever. You folks were
generally excellent. Thank you for accepting me into your community and helping
me do something that I love. There will always be so much to learn.
Whew, over that hump. More bloggery in the future.
I'm glad I finally got down to finishing this post. I hope to increase my
blogging frequency. I should be better at typing up ideas as I have them. I'd
like to make a number of improvements to this website, as well to the content.
I have plenty of things to write about after Flock. Perhaps once I get into the
documentation flow, I'll write a few tutorials. I also hope to recover and
share some posts from my previous blog, at some folks' request. I can't get
anywhere close to every old post I've written, but I can get the stuff from my
last blog. You probably wouldn't want to read the really old stuff anyway. ;)
School starts on Monday.
RIT kicks off this Monday, August 26. I probably still won't be around
too much until then, as I continue to enjoy what remains of my break.
Once school starts, I'll be much more active, as I'll be at my 'top
much more, working out of the FOSSBox, and back to the grind. I'm looking
at another easy semester.
Current Interests
Polishing up my personal projects.
Improving my website and and bloggery.
Getting back into hacking in the FOSSBox during the day
starting next week.
Settling into the new digs and the new school year.
Getting really into Haskell. I was given a project idea that
I'm thinking I'll try to implement in the language.
I'm also interested in learning more Golang, but I want
to see how I like writing in a functional language
before I pick up another iterative one.
Working on a slick Pidora setup, with the intention
of running it as a media-station-sort-of-thing on the
downstairs television.
Got tickets to see Phish at the Rochester war memorial
on October 22!
Continuing to be quite happy all of the time.
Feedback
Send your questions and comments in a plain text email to oddshocks at riseup
dot net. I may respond publicly, so please tell me if you would not like the
email content and/or your name published.