Just got back last night from this years fudcon in Raleigh, NC. Read on for my recap of the event.

fudcon this year was in Raleigh, NC, a location I had only been to once, way back in 1999 for linuxExpo. This time my girlfriend, Wendy came along as she had family out there to visit and in general wanted to tourist around while I was at fudcon.

No particular logistical troubles getting to Raleigh and the hotel thursday night, with the exception of the person we were giving a ride to the hotel having a 1.5 hour delay in his flight. He managed to make it to the hotel ok without us, so that was good.

Friday's sessions were hackfest's. I can see how for some folks this was good as it allowed them to work on items and get a clearer idea of what they wanted to present on Saturday, but I found it a bit out of order for me. I prefer getting the higher level info on whats going on that might interest me, and then using the later days to hack on those things. Still, lots of good info. I managed to crank out a few Merge reviews and even get pretty quick response from maintainers about them. The state club was very nice, and the food was great.

Saturday was the main fudcon presentation day. This day (and sunday) were at the RedHat corp headquarters. It was nice to see the location where many Fedora contributors work everyday. Max gave a nice talk to start things off and show the state of the Fedora union. There was video taping going on, so hopefully we will see this on line soon. Next up was a talk by Michael Tiemann about Fedora in the enterprise. Some very cool ideas here, but it was hard to get concrete answers about how things would work exactly. I'd love to see a few companies step forward and show everyone else how they can integrate into Fedora and have that help them.

Next up were lots of barcamp style short talks. I was torn about which ones to go to, there were so many interesting ones. I went to the infrastructure talk, which was nice as I got to put faces to all the names I see on #fedora-admin every day. Next ended up at the bug triage/bug zappers talk, as thats something I have some strong opinions on. It sounds like there is a group of people really committed to working on that problem now, and I hope I can help them out too. I listened in on a few more talks, then ended up going and catching up on some mail and cvs requests and general chatting with folks.

The last talk I went to was on func. func is very cool. I had seen some info on it, but thought it was another cfengine thing, but instead it looks very nice. I am going to try it out on my home machines very soon, and then possibly look at using it in larger deployments.

Then, there was cake: One with the fedora logo, and one with the CentOS logo (since they just had their birthday, we made them a cake). Good stuff. After that was fudpub, where there was some nice informal conversation and refreshments.

I should say something here about the change in Fedora head honchos, but there isn't too much to really say. Max did a great job of opening up Fedora and getting the community involved and excited, and Paul is just the one to keep that going and the Fedora freedom train rolling down the tracks. Congrats Paul!

I was happy to meet in person some of the Fedora Unity guys who I see every day in #fedora helping users out and working on their respins. Great work guys and nice to meet you!

Overall, the biggest problem I have right now with fedora is that there is so much interesting to do and work on, that it's hard to choose. :) Maintaining packages, reviewing, EPEL, helping with CVSadmin, helping work on fixing the bug problem with bugzappers, QA, Infrastructure, better scripts for multiarch and source checks, neat stuff like func, OPLC help and the list goes on. I am going to work on writing up a list and deciding where I want to concentrate my limited time for the next while with Fedora.