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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.