Fedora Talk FAD: Day 1+2

The last two days of my life have been some of the most pro

I've spent the last two days at Business Playce, a local coworking establishment in Fredericksburg, VA with Paul Frields, John Poelstra, Ian Weller, Jared Smith, and Jeff Ollie. We also had several remote attendees, including Mike McGrath, Clint Savage, Bruno Wolff, and Darren VanBuren.

I arrived in Fredericksburg on Thursday afternoon, when Paul Frields picked me up at the Amtrak station and took me to check in at the brand new Hilton Garden Inn, where the front desk clerk actually knew what Fedora was, though he's using Arch at the moment :).

After checking in at the hotel, Paul took me back to his house where I meet SupaWife and his two really cute kids. After we had dinner, we played some Beatles Rock Band with his daughter. While I'm absolutely no good at Rock Band, it was great fun nonetheless. After that, we went to pick up Ian, Jeff and John at the also very new-looking Richmond airport which Paul can't keep saying great things about.

On to the work end of it, it was an incredibly productive few days, some of the most productive time that I've spent in my time in Fedora in fact. Some highlights:

• Conference recording now works in a pre-beta type of setup - an admin has to use scripts on the command line of the Asterisk box in order to start the recording, but it won't be that way for long, because.....
• A mockup exists of a Fedora Community app to do all of this in a self-service fashion!
• The talk.fedoraproject.org website has gotten pretty much a complete overhaul. This will be going live very soon, for now, you can see it here.
• All of the admin, facilitator, and user use cases that we had on the wiki prior to the FAD were either marked as complete, meaning there was documentation of how to do them, they technically worked, and people should now be able to use them, or there are tickets filed that are assigned to specific people.

Specifically to a few people at the FAD:

• We taught John Poelstra how to use git (even though he kept wanting to refer to it as CVS!)
• I learned how to hack on Fedora's websites - it really isn't that hard, trust me!
• Jared brought his "telco in a box", which we would have been lost without.
• A special shout out goes to the owner of Business Playce, Paul Delagrange, who was extremely accommodating in letting us 1) use a larger room than we had originally reserved, and 2) allowing us to come in on Saturday when the place is normally closed.

Throughout the time, we organized into 45 minute - 1 hour sprints, where we all had a specific set of tasks to accomplish. Whatever could be accomplished in that time was considered as "done' - there was no going back to it if it couldn't be accomplished.

This provided several benefits, the most notable of which is breaking the work up into small manageable chunks rather than one huge project, and providing the feeling that we accomplished something during each hour, and being able to look back on the time that we spent and qualitatively saying that we accomplished X number of things.

We found that this worked incredibly well in the morning, however, towards the afternoon it seemed to have broken down, probably because of the external distraction of the FESCo meeting which took Paul and I very much away from our happy place, and it was sort of difficult to regain momentum after that, but it eventually did happen.

On Friday night, Jared Smith took us out to dinner, compliments of Digium, in exchange for doing a case study on Fedora Talk (thanks Digium!). We went out to Capital Ale House, a good restaurant/bar in downtown Fredericksburg.

On Saturday, we modified the methodology to allow us an hour between checkins instead of 45 minutes, and with no distractions, it seemed to work much better.

On Saturday night, SupaWife cooked us an excellent dinner once again, which was very well received by everyone, and as I write this, John, Ian and Paul are playing Rock Band and doing pretty darn well!