This year, I made it to the event, after I came to know about it while hanging around on IRC in the Official Google Summer of Code channel. Interacting with the people in there, I got a chance to get involved and volunteer for tasks related to the event.
Considering most of the time I was occupied with work for GSoC, I managed to confirm my talk and attend the event for the whole of 3 days.
Event: mukt.in v2 2008
Venue: CSE Department, Osmania University, Hyderabad.
Date: 1-3 August 2008.
Day 1: I was excited that Bhavin Thurakia, CEO of the DirectI Group, was going to be the first “talk”er, considering the fact that I *am* a DirectI customer since few years now, I was looking forward to his talk.
Bhavin talked on “Building Scalable Architecture for Web Apps“ which I personally found very useful. It would have been better, if the mukt.in team had the speakers well informed about the type of audience. As mostly consisted of students, most of them couldn’t get much out of his talk.
I had my talk on the same day, and this being my first public talk. So running a “top” command would have resulted in “99% usage” thinking about “Whats gonna happen?” in my brain, while others were “talking”.
Lunch was awesome in terms of interaction we had. All speakers, while munching the Chinese food, got a chance to informally get to know each other and talk about stuff, mainly whats there talk is all about etc.
The other talk, prior to mine, was by Dushyanth Harinath, DirectI Group, on “DNS Servers – Benchmarks & Performance Analysis” which again was useful. I had to keep special track of Dushyanth as my talk was after his, and during lunch whenever someone asked me about “When is your talk?” I responded “After the DNS Guy’s. OMG Where is he ?” and there he was smiling 
. And NO. I didn’t miss my talk, neither did he 
It was just coz the event was running an hour late coz the lunch arrived late!
After my talk, we had a BoF session with all the students, where they shot questions on to us related to:
- How to get started with Linux
- How to get contributing to a project
- What is FOSS all about?
- to questions like, Linux is OK, I know C, but where and how do I get started???? Was one student!
I am sure with the responses the students might have felt at ease and we also invited them, to bring on their PCs or Laptops to get a “hands on” demo from the speakers on things like How to install Linux or program etc. Not to mention, we already had Linux installation session that day by other speakers.
Day 2: I attended Vid’s talk on “Women in Libre Software Communities“, Openmoko talks by Shakthi Kannan from Qvantel, and a session on “Building Extensions in Ruby” by Thyagarajan. I missed the talk, maybe because I am Joomla! fan 
, “Intro to Drupal” by Warren Nohara, but I did manage to interact with him and we talked on my project and his work later on in the evening.
The FreeRunner fascinated me, but I still complained! If it had a different shape and a camera.. I would have bought as an end-user!! But the idea of it being Open, really opens up avenues for developers working in the Mobile area.
Day 3: I attended the talk by Sebastiaan Deckers, from DirectI Group. His talk was on “How to lead an Open Source Project” where he shared his experience being an admin for the project he founded. Pandion IM Windows Client for XMPP. It was fun as well as enlightening listening to his talk. Antano Solar John‘s talk on “Learning to develop in the open source world” gathered interest too considering he suggested ways on how one should go about learning.
Day 3 ended with all speakers “rewinding” their talks for the sake of us, who missed each others talk. And we did some bunch of adventure too after that.. Car jacking That goes into another post tho!
The mukt.in volunteers do deserve praise for making the event possible and especially the students of the CSE, Osmania University! Thank you
I am sure lessons were learned, everyone had fun, and the spirit of FOSS was shared…
Thanks to all the sponsors, volunteers, speakers who contributed to the events success!
[PS: I Know something's wrong with the topic]