FUDCon Day 0 (Friday): Travel to Toronto

I traveled to FUDCon with Ben Boeckel via my car. It wasn't too long of a car ride (only 6 hours). Considering multiple attendees were from Europe, I'd say it was a rather short time to travel.

We left shortly after breakfast and were in shortly before dinner. We went out to dinner and then met with other attendees in the lobby of the hotel for the rest of the evening.

FUDCon Day 1 (Saturday): Bar Camp

Saturday was a Bar Camp style event. This was my first Bar Camp, but I took a chance and pitched my pet project: CHASM.

I really enjoyed attending all of the presentations. At the, "Effective Bug Reporting," talk, I learned more about the proper way to make sure bugs I encounter get fixed. After the first group of talks, there was an hour break for lunch. In the second group of talks, I attended the, "Mirror Manager/CHASM," presentation. I really enjoyed hearing more about Fedora's mirror architecture. I was impressed by the fact that mirrors can register to serve a particular subnet, and will hopefully be exploiting this fact to create a Fedora mirror for RCOS. Matt Domsch generously cut his time short so that we could pitch our idea for CHASM. The crowd provided insightful input to help us with the design of CHASM. The three other talks I attended were, "What's the Latest with GDB," "Replace dist-cvs with git," and, "Silverblu Minks and Titleist Golf Balls." All three were well worth the hour that I dedicated to each.

That evening was the FUDPub at Dave and Busters. I spent most of the time listening to interesting conversations, particularly concerning Python, and issues that were on the community members' minds. I also enjoyed (and lost) a game of pool. As I was leaving to retire to the hotel, Matt Domsch and Seth Vidal introduced me to John 'Warthog9' Hawley, and suggested I seek his input on CHASM.

FUDCon Day 2 (Sunday): Hackfest I

The first day of hackfests I spent much of my day brainstorming on CHASM. Early in the afternoon Ben and I sat down with John to discuss CHASM. John's input really put the project's goals into a new perspective. Limiting latency during a sync seemed to be one of the features John liked in the project. Based on his advice, we will now be adding file permissions to CHASM in order to enable "bit-flip" support.

The evening was interesting. Many of us had stayed behind at the university to use there Internet. Someone mentioned the, "It's a trap," meme; someone else had no clue what they were talking about. Not content to share the video on a laptop screen, the individual in question turned to the video-conferencing projector in the room. What followed is best described in a single picture:

FUDCon Day 3 (Monday): Hackfest II

The second day of hackfests seemed more productive. Ben and I came up with an additional feature for CHASM: cache management. Previously we had no intention of adding cache support to CHASM; operating systems developers put many more resources into solving this problem correctly. The cache management feature simply will maintain a list of files assumed to be in the filesystem cache in order to preferentially serve said files.

We returned to the hotel early so that we could attend the hack and snack event. I was pretty tired by the end of the day, so I turned in early for the night for the long drive home.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed FUDCon. The Fedora community was very friendly and inviting. In the future I hope to interact with the community more, and not just be a user. Previous distributions I've used never really drew me to the community. Fedora not only drew me to following the community online, but also attending the users and developers conference. In this post I didn't talk much about CHASM. I will be addressing CHASM more in the future.