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DevConf.cz 2024

· 6 min read
Matej Focko

I'd like to share my experience and views on some of the talks that I've attended on the DevConf.cz 2024.

Day 1​

Let's start with the first day which was Thursday this year as opposed to the previous years when the conference started on Friday and finished on Sunday.

Let's start with the keynote. The keynote wasn't very interesting, at some of the slides actually felt like advertisement for other talks on the topic of the AI…

Next talk about event-driven Ansible was way more interesting. It allows you to run Ansible playbooks after provisioning hosts, or on certain events, such as discovered vulnerabilities. On one hand it feels like a very nice thing, but on the other one I can't help but to think how you need to write the playbooks, so that they are generic enough. One more example that's been given comes from the possibility to react to tickets, e.g., outages and this feels like something that could be abused to cause DoS.

Afterwards we've seen two lightning talks, one about choosing the right OpenShift size which was a pretty quick, but listed all of the possible ways you can deploy OpenShift in detail. This lightning talk was followed by the first AI (lightning) talk I've attended about rapid prototyping of the open-source AI models.

As someone who's involved in the automation of the RPM packaging and testing, of course, we had to attend Learning from Nix. Nix has a very intriguing concept which is pretty powerful, but painful at the same time. This can be summed up pretty nicely by Tsoding who got asked about some tips & tricks for someone who wants to try out NixOS:

Just don't.

And now we're moving into a section where everything revolves about the Packit Team :)

First talk about changelogs was an interactive session that was (probably) meant to share different approaches we take to handle this rather convoluted topic that involves changelogs on both upstream and also on downstream with no rules1.

changelogs

Next one was about static analysis done by OpenScanHub. I like the idea of running the static analysis that can uncover nasty bugs (as it has been even showed in the talk) at the same time as they are introduced. I gotta admit that after seeing the UI of the deployed OpenScanHub on the Fedora Infra, I couldn't help but to think about the United States Graphics Company 😄 The UI is to the point, no fancy annoying shit, you get what you need, it's hard to get lost. Just simplicity. Best kind of UI/UX in my opinion.

After the OpenScanHub talk we're getting to talks that were taken in a totally different direction from the usual talks you're used to 😉 First one was given title of “Indiana Jones and obsoleted projects” by Mirek. He talked about projects that got obsoleted, but started with projects that had no relation to IT field at all. I'd mark this talk as a stand up without any hesitation.

And finally we will wrap up the first day with the talk where speakers spoke the least… “Let the users speak!” that involved users of both Packit and Testing Farm who spoke about their use case and benefits they gained from using both services in a symbiosis.

Day 2​

On the second day I've attended less talks to not burn myself out :) I've started with an AI-related talk with title “AI: Open source will save us!”, even though this talk has been improvised, as the speakers from the schedule couldn't have attended, it provided a nice overview what InstructLab can do and how can you “feed” the relevant info into the language models by yourself.

After that I attended a “coffee enthusiasts Meetup” which was very nice and, of course, an organized chaos 😉

Before attending the social event I wrapped up the second day with a lightning talk about recent updates in Toolbx. I've used both toolbx and distrobox, so it's nice to see the improvements in progress and also that both projects are well and lively.

Day 3​

On the third day I've attended only in the afternoon. “Started” my day with a discussion “Leadership: Where people skills meet programmers” which was very nice for gaining an insight into how developer, manager and QE lead roles overlap.

That talk has been followed up by a talk about role rotation in our Packit Team. I would say it is a nice “upgrade” to the agile process which allows you to not create a single point of failure in the mundane and repetitive processes within your team.

And this day has been finished off with a talk about shifting left in Podman. It's nice to see how other teams utilize our Packit Service and also the services we rely on, such as Copr or Testing Farm. With the help of Cockpit tests they can catch breaking changes early on, or even bugs that have been introduced and break usage of the dependent projects.

shifting left

Picks from the Packit Team​

On the Tuesday, during our Packit stand up, I have managed to abuse my Kanban Lead role to collect some of the talks that each of us would recommend:

Wrap up​

I have to admit that these 3 days have been pretty exhaustive, including information overload 😄 but at the same time it was really nice to meet with the colleagues and at least some of our users who are not based in Brno.

Footnotes​

  1. except for the Fedora's downstream ;) ↩