 So who am I? I'm Alexander Fedora. I currently work as principal software engineer in Red Hat. I work on continuous integration topics. We do CI for RHEL and for Fedora. In Fedora, I'm a member of Fedora Continuous Integration Special Interest Group. I created it and we work on CI implementation automation for testing in Fedora. We do similar things in RHEL and will be doing in CentroStream. I was on the first core of Fedora Engineering Committee last year. I'm currently elected member of Fedora Consul. I also have one package I maintain in Fedora. It is called MindTest. It's a game for those. If you're a fan of Minecraft, don't listen to the next sentence. But MindTest is an open source alternative to Minecraft, which I highly recommend, especially in these antisocial times. It has support for Android Windows clients and you can play with your friends and family for free. And it's better performance than the Minecraft actually. Take a look after this talk. I've been Fedora contributor for more than 10 years now. I started as just a member of Russian speaking Fedora community. I was an administrator of Russian Fedora community for some time. I'm still active there. I did release parties as Fedora Ambassador. We organized events. We organized a translated version of test days. And things like that were writing documentation and a lot of things actually. So you can see that over 10 years I collected a lot of stories. And basically I made Fedora community work part of my usual life for so long that I can claim that the impact Fedora community had on my career path is enormous. Actually you'll see that from the very beginning Fedora provided me with ways to start this career. And actually I ended up here doing Fedora work. So it was all the way Fedora. But let's start from the start. The first story I'm going to tell is how I actually switched to Linux and how I got my first 80 job. So long time ago, not long time, but some time ago, I was a student of pure mathematics in Moscow State University. I was specializing in geometry and topology. And as a student of pure mathematics, you really have no connection to the real world matters. Apart from that part where you need to write down all your abstract findings and reasonings on a paper and to make it into article and your diploma work, which you need other people to read. And as a student of mathematics, you write articles in Latin. For those who don't know, Latin has a special language which is much better suited to describe mathematical formulas and complex mathematical objects than usual word processors. And so at that time, we had in the student circles, we had this manual of about five pages long manual how to set up an environment on Windows to work with Latin and actually be able to edit a lot of files and provide PDFs out of them. One part of that manual was about how to set up the Latin itself on Windows. The other part was about how to make it support Cyrillic letters because it's one story about getting Latin work, but Cyrillics in the pre-UTF 8 world was a huge complicated topic and I had to write article in Russian for my university. And the third part of this manual was how you're supposed to bypass licensing checks and use the software to edit Latin without paying for a license for Windows world, you know? And after reading this manual, actually after reading the first part of it, I started to feel dizzy and at that moment I decided that no, I don't want to live in this world. I want to switch to Linux. So the basic reasons why I switched to Linux were the two things, the latex and IMAX auktech, we plug into IMAX which allowed you to write latex texts very easily. And yeah, you guess it may be, it may sound strange for regular users, but I switched to Linux because it was easier. It was like the most easiest tool to solve the task of writing an article. And of course this Linux was Fedora Linux. And this is how my path started, but it was only the first step. The second step was I was using this Linux system basically as a typewriter to write and nothing else, but then the question came like how do I connect to Internet? And at that moment, connecting to Internet was a hard task because it was all about PPTP network connection, so you had to set up your system to connect to intermediate host which will connect you to Internet further. There were some complications in the protocol and one task was to connect and the second task was to configure default network routes so that request to external resource goes through the right node and is not lost on the local network. And you can imagine at that moment I had no idea what network route is, especially what PPTP is like nothing, I didn't know anything except how to type a text in the text editor. So I came to our network administrators and asked for help and the person came and like he was a very confident guy and he entered the room and said like, who here needs help with network? And so, yes, please, this is my computer, please help me. He touched the button, screen saver was closed and he saw Linux. And at that moment, he realized like he was a network administrator but Windows network administrator. He couldn't help me with Linux at all. So I switched to people with, we had a local Linux community there as well. It was community of Gen2 users and they had a solution. So I asked them for help and they brought me a script with like, you know how Gen2 users solve problems. They write scripts of 200 lines and they said like, yeah, if you make this script running, it will solve your problem, it will configure everything. And of course, this script didn't run on Fedora. And at that moment, I made my first engineering decision because of course, when I say your script doesn't work on my system, I need this help for Fedora. They said like, why don't you reinstall to Gen2 and like configure a script there? And I said like, no, I'm not going to solve a problem by reinstalling the system to a different one. I'm going to solve a problem for Fedora on Fedora and in the Fedora way. So I don't want to just like copy your script and tweak it so it works. I want to make it work the way Fedora networking subsystem expected to work. And I took the task and I spent next two weeks dual boot into Windows and back again trying to figure out how this whole thing works. Reading manuals, boot into Linux, trying, failing, booting back to Windows, going to internet, reading again and so on. So two weeks of messing up with all these configuration files in Fedora and I made it work. And this was my first ever achievement, like I really, really made it work. It boosted my confidence so much you cannot even imagine. And what happened is that I realized that even though it was a frustrating experience, like two weeks for it to set up a network connection, it was actually very interesting work to do. Yeah, it was hard, but it was possible. And then the end result when it finally worked, it was so amazing. And this gave me the idea that probably the engineering job is what I want to do. That I like this and I wanted to keep working with this. So when I started to think about my first job, even though I was students of mathematics and had no previous experience, I said that I want to go to IT. I want to go to engineering. And I chose the first position as a junior support engineer. And I went to the job interview. It was my first job interview. I was absolutely crazy nervous. I knew nothing. I didn't know how to behave. I didn't know what to say. I came to the job interview and I said, I want to be a junior support engineer. And then interview started and they started to ask me all those weird questions. You know, like, what's DNS or what's the difference between TCP and UDP or how SMTP works? And what do you choose like POP or EMAP-free? All this kind of interesting stuff and back then I had no idea of any of those things. Like, I saw the letters but I really couldn't explain anything what's behind those letters. It's just the letters I saw on the internet. And you can imagine interview didn't went well. It was like, yeah, I know nothing. I don't know. I don't know. And I don't know. And then the guy who interviewed me, he said, why do you want to go for engineering position? Maybe you can go better to the call center operator position. You don't need any knowledge there. You just sit on the phone and reply according to the playbook. And I said, no, no, no, no. I want to be the engineer. I want the engineering thing. Of course, I don't know things right now. It's like, I'm total noob and they have no idea. But I said, and here Fedora comes. I said, but just last week I configured PPTP connection on my Fedora core Linux. And the reaction of that guy was priceless. He like said, what? PPTP on Fedora core Linux. You configured it. And I haven't done it yet still myself. He said, and it changed the whole interview story. They like said, okay, yes, you are engineer. We're taking you. Of course, you will need to learn stuff. But yes, okay. This is how my IT career started. And next day I was a junior support engineer learning all of these things about DNS and SMTP and what for. So year and a half later I changed from junior support engineer to a lead support engineer in that company. And yeah, I left it at that point because I decided still to pursue my PhD and not continue yet in the IT area. But it was the first IT experience and based on Fedora. So yeah, Fedora helps you to pass the job interview. Okay. I'll make a pause here. I still have more stories, but if you want to ask something or comment. Okay. Okay, this was just the beginning, right? So what also happened with this PPTP Fedora stuff is while I was searching for a solution. I accidentally joined Fedora IRC channel. Russian speaking Fedora IRC channel. We had a Fedora Russian channel on IRC back then. And I tried to ask my questions there, but I didn't ask the right questions and people were not able to help me really that much. But I started to hand out there. And then I noticed that there are conversations going and in some of those conversations, I can participate. Not maybe as an expert who explains how to solve things, but as a person who says, oh yeah, I also have this problem. Or maybe as a person who says like, oh, that's unfortunate you have such a bug. I heard something about it yesterday. And I started to hand out on this Fedora IRC for more and more and like people started to ask questions. And when we ask questions for the first time, someone else replies them. But when the second time the question comes, I'm able to answer that. And yeah, this whole thing started by handing out reading the logo of the IRC chat and sometimes like jumping in and talking with people. So yeah, also maybe one thing too, which may be worth noting here is that there is a difference between local Fedora chat, like localized Fedora chat, maybe Russian speaking Fedora chat and the generic Fedora chat. The problem I have with the official Fedora IRC channels that there is no place for handing out there. And it's not because like people didn't provide it. It's just because naturally it's so huge. So it is hard to track conversations of 3000 people in one channel. We have to enforce more stricter rules on this channel to make it productive. But I think that it is important to have those smaller, lighter versions of Fedora community channels for smaller groups. Sometimes because yeah, there you can be more flexible, have more freedom and like sometimes discuss off topic matters and no one will ban you from there. So this is maybe one thing to note. Like don't always try to merge every channel into every other one, but having local smaller communities help. And yeah, the next part story, which I want to share is how I chose my path as being an engineer. Because when you just start the engineering career, you have not that many knowledge about the range of engineering activities and engineering work, which is available to you. There are four basic roles which are well known right now and which are well known outside of engineering community. These roles are like system administrator, quality assurance testing, support engineer and programmer. So there are like four cornerstones of the engineering career, right? And when you choose your path or even before junior, you try to choose between these four. But this vision of the engineering world is actually very limiting and it is not right vision. It's just a vision of an IT from a point of view of a Hollywood movie. In engineering, really, there's so much more of different activities, more or less engineering depending on your preferences. And so for me, the understanding of this fact also came from Fedora because like a couple years later after that support thing, I worked as system administrator in a small company. And I was the only system administrator there. I worked and like it was nice, but the problem was that being an only expert in the field while you're still not really expert and just have started only recently is a bad thing, right? You kind of sit and you do what you know, but no one is there to teach you, no one is there to say no, you're doing it wrong, please change it and so on. So I was thinking that I need to build, to change something, I need to find a new opportunity and I need to like build my path forward. I don't want to stay this admin of a small company forever. So I was, I started to think about like what I want to do as an engineer, which direction I want to take. And I was looking like, no, I don't want to do programming. I don't want to do testing. What I want to do, really want to do is I want to do what Fedora does. This really was the answer for me because by then I already knew how Fedora release process works, how alpha beta and final release happens, how packages come into repositories, how repositories come into ISO and how it's a lot of work in making many moving pieces to work together to actually be compatible and to be delivered to final destination. And this is the kind of work which is engineering but it's engineering with a wide range of tasks, each of them small but very wide reach. And it was very interesting for me to see this structure, to see these pipelines, to see the flow, how pieces of code from upstream go into these packages which go finally into your workstation. And I learned the word release engineering from Fedora and I learned that there is activity which is called release engineering which is about building the thing out of the small pieces and it's still engineering. It's not like management, it's an actual engineering task. And I tried to search for it as my new opportunity and I looked for a job specifically with this term. And I didn't find any because the storm was so unfamiliar at that moment to the wider corporate IT market. People didn't realize back then that release engineering is a thing, is a separate thing which you need to do. It was in the pre DevOps times, right? So that's why I always like laugh a bit when I hear about DevOps, like new stuff, modern way of doing things. It's actually, we were doing DevOps in Linux distributions long before it, the name has appeared for the activity of connecting pieces between operations and developers in making them talk to each other. And this is what we're doing as a Linux distribution. And so, yeah, I didn't find the release engineering work, but because I was searching for this term, I actually find one specific position which was called build engineer. And I said like, yeah, if I cannot get to release engineer, at least I will try this thing. And this, and I went there, I passed the interview, I got a position of built engineer in the company where we were building Linux kernel bits and for various platforms. And I learned that there is actually an opportunity to be a built engineer. And that's also a thing. It's not just something which happens automatically when you develop an application. And, like, if you develop a really big thing, then built engineer is a whole lot of knowledge on its own about building those pieces all together. And this is where it started. This is where I entered this huge companies with very interesting infrastructure problems in interesting workflows, and which are much more complicated when usually get commit test built and done thing, which you think as a junior, is exist there, exist there. Yeah. And here Fedora wasn't explicitly there at my job interview, but it is what triggered me to search for something else, something new, something more fun. Okay. I can go on and on. So, more stories, let me know when I should stop and then answer questions. Hi, I was just jumping in. Since you, you know, want it to be interactive, I'll jump in with a question now, but it was actually about the first story. Okay. Yeah. So, when you were in the office in the interview, I said to you, wouldn't you be more, when you be more suited to the call center, you know, you have the Fedora thing in your back pocket. And some of our contributors might have that in the back pocket too, but I guess I'm going to ask, like, what did you call on to give you the confidence in that situation, you know, you're in this situation and I think, like, I'm impressed by how you handled that. And I don't think that everyone might have that innate confidence or innate ability or maybe you, maybe you actually grew that yourself or maybe you had a mentor or your parents, like, where do you feel like you got the strength to stand up in that moment? Yeah, I definitely had a very support, very a lot of support in my family. So for me, programming was not something totally unfamiliar. I played the game of programming when I was in school with my parents when they actually created some list of tasks, you know, how to draw things and you had to create a simple program to draw a spiral or to draw boxes. So I wasn't enjoying this activity before that. And I wasn't like, I had the thought that I can do this, supported with Fedora. But also I think what helped me a lot then and then later is this mathematical background, because I don't want to raise a Hollywood topic here, but in it area of mathematics is considered to be like relevant discipline. Well, it can be argued, but it was running my family basically, the idea that if you can do mathematics, you can do everything. So it's basically, I did believe that nothing can stop me really if I if I really want to, it's just matter of what I really want. And then I will find a way to get there, because yeah, I do math and like, what else can stop me? I want to ask you something like very genuinely. And if I sound naive, please forgive me. I had a very close friend in high school who was from Russia. And her family also put a huge emphasis on mathematics. She had her going to like a special mathematics school. And I remember her father was a programmer. And even though her mother was an artist, she had also been a scientific researcher, and was doing with mathematics and science. So I was just curious, like, is that emphasis on mathematics something that's cultural? Yeah, I think in Russia, the culture, it sometimes gets weird even, but it really is if in school you have science class, the arts class and the rest class. And you always want to go to the first because the quality of teachers of everything will be better. And the first thing is, it's something in the culture in Russia that we don't trust that much human arts. And we kind of, we have a well developed technical knowledge, but we don't have a well established humanities, like as a field, as an area of expertise. That's interesting. I wanted to ask, do you feel like, do you feel like that was that interaction that you had with that person was solely based on your qualifications, or do you feel as though it was also because of your gender? I think gender was part of the surprise for that person. But I don't think he really focused on this that much. But again, I think I cheated a lot of gender related stereotypes with a mathematical background. So I do believe like, sometimes it's even like, shouldn't be happening like this. But I know that in like, using my mathematical background, I can open more doors than without it. So it helped. And it resets certain stereotypes. So people are already surprised by the mathematical backgrounds. We are easier to catch that I can also surprise you in IT. And you can also like, also don't apply my stereotype in IT as well. So sometimes it helped. Also not only on a junior level, it happened on a senior level. Once it was really very explicit, because I talked with a person from a different department about some technical implementation of the architecture of a solution, which we want to do. And I was my opinion was completely discarded. And then in the evening we had informal conversation. And I told that I have a PhD in geometry and topology. And next day, the guy was talking to me completely different. Like he really started to listen. And yeah, so sometimes this thing helps, but don't know how to suggest other people to. Well, I think maybe it's having a good understanding of your specific fields. And, you know, kind of bracing yourself or having that. Hey, this moment could come. And when that moment comes, this is what I'm going to say, or these are the things I will. Yeah, yeah, this is actually the advice you can take from here is like, find your own personal wow effect, you know, like something which you can use to surprise people. It doesn't have to be relevant to the field you are your targeting, right? It can be totally different thing. But you if you have this bot option, and luckily, yeah, yeah, but I can do this thing, you can research a lot of this conversations into a different way and it can help. And I have my own open source actually does it for you. I have my own story there too, like, going to going to flocks in the past, you know, just very recently in the fcake role so I haven't been to flock as fcake just contributor. And there's always new people that come come every year so you know we're always meeting new people there. And I'll often have conversations with people who don't really know like my involvement or what, what I have to do and sometimes I think that I don't even been asked like, Oh, are you here with somebody, you know, like, am I the wafer partner of somebody here and I'm like, No, I run fedora badges, and I've designed almost all of them. And, you know, like, and then they're like, What? And I'm like, Yeah, I've run that project for like four years and I teach people on that and they're just like, Wow, like, you do, you do this thing. So having that kind of in your, your back pocket and ready to go and be like, This is the thing I do and kick ass that and not being afraid to brag about it. Yeah, yeah, use it. And also, I think it's important to like work actively on your portfolio. This is this is the kind of thing you need. And this is where it happens sometimes where people like, say, you got the PhD, like in mathematics, but you are not paid for it. So why That sounds like it's war flat. And I said, like, No, every side activity you do. It goes back to you and it helps in one way or the other, maybe not today, maybe like in 10 years, you will recognize that all these side projects which you've built, they actually pay back and they actually help you go through certain stages. And it can be like hobby project to create or to draw like the artist project, it can be hobby project as an engineering project. But yeah, they can, they can work to two years later, they still will work and and you had a lot of fun doing them. And that's definitely with badges, like, I still get to brag about that, you know, and I still am a part of that. So I definitely don't spend as much time, but I have a question here from the chats. I totally can relate how the view into tech from outside is very narrow. And a lot of us do not know what prospects engineering holds. Can you let us know what helped you figured out what prospects would be available to newbies, or how we can explore to know those opportunities. So one way which I did describe is to to learn about engineering and more different aspects of it is this interaction with open source communities for me it helped a lot because like it opened the world for me for very technical documentation work because like release engineering work there is like testing work and all of these pieces come together in some such ways that you can learn this. So, so one thing is just this networking and connect connecting to certain projects and watching after how other people do it. The second part which works for me quite well personally is that I chose it to target the large company to start with because when you enter large company you can enter it at one position but you will learn a lot about the interactions inside the company you will learn about other people and their different roles and you get the exposure to like a whole huge world of different tasks and areas so what works for me is like I entered as a junior support engineer I started to work in the largest Russian hosting provider. And they had a huge data center they had a support team admin team, there was a development team, and I started to watch after how the teams interact like I was sitting next to the data center engineer and I was watching how they carry service here from from here to there. I was like interacting with everyone. So, I guess, don't try to win at the first moment. Try to reach there and then figure your path from inside. It may work. It may help. And this the other part of this advice is like, if it doesn't work, don't, don't stay there for too long. Right. So, you can go to the position which you don't really like to start you to like get the experience but if you stay in that position you don't like for too long. This means it doesn't work you need to do something about it actively. Don't keep it just because it can be so draining. Yeah, yeah. So, I have another question for you. Okay, your blog series quantum integration has been very useful learning resource and reference for me. Any plans to continue that blog? Oh, I found the reader from the blog. That's, that's thank you so much. So, you see, probably that. So, there's a thing about the articles you write, right? I usually write articles out of frustration. This is what happens in drives is like, you try to do something it doesn't work exactly like you wanted and when you write an article how it should work for real and how you think it all comes together properly. So you can see that the year 2017 when I wrote most of that articles wasn't particularly fulfilling to me because it was before I joined redhead. So, I do want to keep writing I'm trying. I'm actually in preparation for the article for open source.com now but yeah so the reason why you don't see new updates on that thing is because I have now more channels to communicate my positions and less frustration maybe. So, I developed develop and develop for it. Yeah, go on, Mary. Was being on the Fedora Council what you expected it to be? Not really. I think it works for both Fesco and Fedora Council, because again, if you're an outsider from a far away, you think of Fesco is like people who decide things in Fedora and console like people who make things work in Fedora. But then you enter both of these groups and you realize how small actually the reach of those groups is and how much Fedora community is just the community and the Fesco and console. People on Fesco and console can try, they do amazing work and they navigate as much as they can, but they cannot replace the community and if you want things done, you actually need to go and do them rather than get to console and try to force someone because you cannot force anyone from the console or from Fesco. You can only work with what community brings to you and if community brings to you the idea, fine. If it doesn't, then you need to make it. And yeah, this was a change in mind for me for both of these groups. Right, because when I felt the same exact way when I saw a council from the outside, you know, whatever, I was like, oh, you know, big important group of people that make decisions and we all have to go along with that kind of stuff. But, you know, being on the council, it's a lot more consultation, trying to resolve and make things work smoother in whatever area of the project that might Exactly. Matthew Miller says we can't actually do anything without people to do it. And that's definitely a good point. But I guess the reason that I wanted to ask you that question is because I think historically and when I joined even we've had low participation from women. And I'm, I don't know, or not if there's been anyone who's non binary. We've had low participation from women on the council I was so excited when you ran in and got a position on there just because I'm there and I'm like, yes, a little lady to talk to. But I guess I wanted to just point that out because like, I think more women could have that opportunity. It's a chance to I think and be a part of a decision making process. It's a lot less scary or intimidating than it sounds. Yeah, I remember when I first came to some Fedora event. It was a Linux tag in Berlin and there was Fedora booth. And I came to Fedora booth and there was this. Christopher Fickert was there. And I was like, Oh, I'm staying next to a person who is on the council or board of fesco system. Oh, how cool is that. And then I realized like, Oh, no, you know, it's actually everyone can from community can come and be that person you don't need to wait 10 years to get there you just need to come and take it. It's it's all there for you. So it's actually amazing how many opportunities you have in open source communities if you just try that the most hardest issue is to talk yourself into trying to try. Like, yes, you should just go and try it. That was actually an interesting point when I was organizing those events in Russian speaking community. I learned how easy it is to get something for free, because we were sitting there in the community and was like, Yeah, we need to build server for some of the Russian Fedora remix stuff. Where do we get it? Do we pay for it? And I said, Okay, wait a second, I will just write a mail to a hosting provider and ask if we want to donate the server for us. So I just wrote an email to people on there and said, Like, you know, we're just the Linux community. We want to build server. Can you give it to us? And I said, Of course, please take it. And it was just, yes, do take it and you don't need to do anything complex about it. You just need to ask and you get your given and the same happened with events. Yeah, just by asking. Yeah, yeah, we've a conference also we were looking for a venue for a conference and we're like, Yeah, where do we get the sponsorship of a budget to organize the conference. And we said, Okay, let's try to write a mail to this nearest IT business around and just ask them if we can provide venue. Yes, of course, please come and organize them. So yeah, it's all about just starting and just showing the initiative and then it works from there. Yeah. All right, so we're running short on time. I'm going to say this is the longest session so far and I feel like it could go longer. So I'd love to hear more from you at some point. We are putting together this little piece of content after the events. And I don't know if you saw the Budapest video that we made, but it's similar to that. So the first part. The Hi, my name is that should be in your native language. And then the second part, we are from different countries. We speak that part in English. And then at the, at the end we are fedora. So does that make sense? Yes, it makes sense. So I, I now need to focus on the text. Okay, I'll try. Okay. Switching to Russian is hard after hour of talking in English. Resetting. My name is Alexandra Fyodorov. I'm from Russia. I'm a woman and I speak Russian. We're from different countries. We speak different languages and we are of different cultures. But Fedora unites us with open source. We are fedora. I love that. Thank you. That was great. I'm going to jump off. Need to break before the next session. If there's any more questions, you can, people want to jump on the screen, they can actually request and then you can moderate and let them up. So I'm going to hop out for now. Thanks again for coming. I really enjoyed everything you had to say. I also add a last note for the audience in the room. If you want to talk more about your experience, if you want tips from me about how to drive through engineering, how to fight with some not so friendly corporate environments, let me know. I was an outreach member before, but I realized it takes too much of my time. So I cannot be the official outreach member, but I do want to help anyone who needs the help. So feel free to reach out to have informal conversation. I'll be glad to help in any way I could. Can you drop your handle in the channel? Okay. Or in the chat. Sure. They can people can find you. It's book war for everyone else on the video. All right, bye. Thank you. And Bye everyone.