blog(devconf-2024): add the blog post

Signed-off-by: Matej Focko <me@mfocko.xyz>

blog/2024-06-19-devconf-2024.md

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+---
+title: DevConf.cz 2024
+description: |
+  Sharing my experience on DevConf.cz 2024.
+date: 2024-06-19
+authors:
+  - key: mf
+    title: a.k.a. exhausted DevConf attendee
+tags:
+  - 🏭
+  - red-hat
+  - fedora
+  - devconf
+  - conferences
+---
+
+I'd like to share my experience and views on some of the talks that I've
+attended on the DevConf.cz 2024.
+
+<!--truncate-->
+
+## 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 intersting, 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 detailly
+listed all of the possible ways you can deploy OpenShift. 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
+rules[^1].
+
+![changelogs](https://i.imgur.com/YHstMAt.jpg)
+
+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] :smile: 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 :wink: 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 :wink:
+
+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](https://i.imgur.com/bp6FxT9.jpg)
+
+## 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:
+
+- [Rapid Prototyping] with Open Source AI Models
+- Do you like your [changelogs]?
+- OpenScanHub - [Static Analysis] of a Linux Distribution
+- Creating a [Language Server] for RPM Spec Files
+- Containers and Kubernetes Made Easy: A 15-minute dive into [Podman Desktop]
+- [“Leadership: Where people skills meet programmers”]
+
+## Wrap up
+
+I have to admit that these 3 days have been pretty exhaustive, including
+information overload :smile: 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.
+
+[^1]: except for the Fedora's downstream ;)
+
+[keynote]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/AD3HWR/
+[event-driven ansible]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/3UKGLB/
+[choosing the right openshift size]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/KSDRWL/
+[rapid prototyping]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/H9QFLM/
+[learning from nix]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/NNKT3F/
+[tsoding]: https://twitch.tv/tsoding
+[changelogs]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/ECU7QS/
+[static analysis]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/7C38GJ/
+[openscanhub]: https://openscanhub.dev/
+[deployed openscanhub]: https://openscanhub.fedoraproject.org/
+[united states graphics company]: https://x.com/usgraphics
+[“indiana jones and obsoleted projects”]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/X8SYDG/
+[mirek]: https://rodina-sucha.cz/@mirek
+[“let the users speak!”]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/BDMWF3/
+[“ai: open source will save us!”]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/QSF9QQ/
+[instructlab]: https://github.com/instructlab/instructlab
+[recent updates in toolbx]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SXWE7K/
+[toolbx]: https://containertoolbx.org/
+[distrobox]: https://distrobox.it/
+[“leadership: where people skills meet programmers”]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/8PARM8/
+[role rotation]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/8T88MT/
+[shifting left]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/WVNJZS/
+[copr]: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/
+[testing farm]: https://docs.testing-farm.io/Testing%20Farm/0.1/index.html
+[language server]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/RXKMKA/
+[podman desktop]: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/HKWP7V/