FUDCon Blacksburg: Day 1

Welp, I'm here at FUDCon Blacksburg. I meant to blog about it ahead of time, but never quite got around to it. It's a slightly odd organization this year, very hackfest-heavy, with the keynote and barcamp stuff happening only on Day 2. So far I'm feeling fairly useless, as I can't contribute much to any of the running hackfests, but never mind. We do have a good QA presence: myself, Tim Flink, John Dulaney and Sandro Mathys are all here, a nice RH / community mix. We are aiming to give a few talks and run a couple of hackfests, an AutoQA hackfest this afternoon and a hackfest to work on testing the new Anaconda UI on Sunday, so keep an eye out on the schedule for those! I'm going to pitch a talk I've been thinking about vaguely but only actually somewhat 'written' in the last half hour, called Cloud 0.1, about running your own infrastructure for mail, web, news and so on - in other words, these days, duplicating Google's services with less reliability, at more expense and effort. But hey, it's 'fun'. I don't have any slides, but I think it might make a mildly diverting hour at least. We'll see if anyone signs up for it. I do have a more QA-related talk as well, but it's more for a general audience than a FUDCon one - it's about various principles I've learned on how to function usefully as a small group trying to do a big job within a big project in a short timeframe. I could pitch that too, but we're probably going to be long on talks for a single day anyway, so I may not. Tim and I have also been talking about maybe coming up with a talk on Cool QA Tools, with his new remote_install thingy, fedora-easy-karma, the proposed GUI for f-e-k, and a few others. If you're at FUDCon and want to chat about anything, feel free to buttonhole me at any time - I'm mostly just taking a 'show up and see what happens' approach to this one. I'll update as things start to come together...