Friday
Good morning, git! It’s 4:00 in the morning and I’m awake, I would like to write a bunch of scss code to improve the looks of our fedoraloves.net portal. It’s a PR! Or in actual words a pull request with my changes, very basic table formatting that I will improve on with different kramdown styles after all them conferences. Speaking of, I should get ready for devconf and my quite busy day to come. An hour in bathroom and I’ll run… 7:45
I picked up Jona and Sachin at their hotel, walked to the venue to get there before 8:45, register, pick up my speaker’s name tag and some swag - they ran out of the purple hoodies already! I got a grey boring one :<
I went to Keynote talk, then Brian Profitt’s talk around community metrics and the CHAOSS project. Leaving some stickers at the Fedora booth and racing to get something for lunch real quick, talking to a bunch of people on the way… whew, no time for anything!
It’s 15 minute walk (if you’re almost running) between our office and the devconf venue. I had to get there, pick up new fedoraloves.net cards and tshirts that just arrived - I had to order new cards because the first batch contained major bugs.
Radka at the beginning of her talk (photo: Justin W Flory)
The T-Shirts are perfect fit, love them, looks good! Another race to the train station to pick up Justin who’s been awake for some 24 hours, traveling from US…
I got back to the venue around 14:30, dropped off them cards at the Fedora booth and chased Tom to give him a t-shirt to wear during his dotnet talk hehe… And I was trying to figure out what to talk about - and how. I could barely speak! I had cold a month ago and although I was okay for weeks, my voice still did not recover from it.
Cool! There was close to 50% people with C# experience on Linux! …and only some 10-20% with Windows or Mac. Very unexpected for me. Otherwise, I know that the talk wasn’t great because I had really hard time talking, but I was quite satisfied with what I did manage to pull off… Had plenty of followup discussions after the talk and during the rest of the conference. I listened to Tom talk about C# 7.1 and 7.2 features within the rest of my time, and then he presented his DBus library and codegen.
After that and some more dotnet discussions, we got to see nice, relatively big fireworks for the 10th devconf anniversary. Another race to the office to change back to my usual evul clothes (out of the Fedora<3.NET T-Shirt) and then smol dinner. I got home around 22:00 and did a little bit of critical bug fixing.
Saturday
The second day was a tiny bit less busy, but I barely got to eat lunch and slept only 4-ish hours. I’ve signed up for the lightning talks as well. With a bit of encouragement from Justin and quick brainstorming, I presented an important idea about the future of our children:
It’s common misconception that IT and open source is full of programmers, geeks and cave trolls. Hello, my name is Radka and I’m here to collect some data, so let’s not waste any time and let’s get started.
Could you please raise your hand if you have a child, or a few… or even a niece or nephew?
And how many of you bought plush toys as presents for your boy?
How many of you bought airbrush or pencils painting set for your boy?
How many of you bought a huge truck or a robot for your girl?
And now what do you think is the point I’m heading towards?
We need to let the kids decide and protect them from the pressure of the society.
Boys and girls are often preconditioned to a specific way from an early age. There are many reasons why not a lot of women are in tech. But this is one of those puzzle pieces. I would like to have a couple minutes’ discussion about what we as individuals can do to support more women in technology from young age. What do you think?
Oh and we are not cave trolls. Everyone at devconf is the proof of that.
I had a lot of people interested in a discussion about the topic later and the next day. I believe that the message was heard \o/
CommOps FAD Attendees at an improvised tour of the city (photo: Dennis Gilmore)
Sunday
The last day of Devconf.cz eh? The least busy day of the three, I got to see half a talk about Pagure. For what it’s worth, thanks for the 2nd half pingou :D
Monday to Wednesday
After devconf we had CommOps FAD where I was responsible for the logistics. We’ve done some great work three, but it wasn’t easy for me - there were issues with communication which is sometimes a big deal when you’re dealing with logistics. Definitely something I need to work on for the future events that I’ll be taking care of - better organize communication.
Thursday to Monday
CHAOSSCon & GrimoireCon on Friday, and FOSDEM on the weekend. Since it’s only wednesday, this is still ahead of me. I’m already beyond the point of ded-grade exhaustion…