When /me was at foss.in/2008

Probably I am the last one to write the report on the event by now But heck, I had exams before and after the event and then life took over But I decided to write it up before the year ends! It will be a long post, you have been warned

This was my first time at foss.in and I had only seen about it over the web, pictures, and heard about it from the *people*. After mukt.in/2008, this was the second FOSS community event that I attended representing Sahana. As someone new to all this stuff, I was really confused all the time, asking people questions on how to go about it on the mailing list and the IRC, especially about the Workouts AKA Hackathons.

So basically, I had the workout planned and prepared well enough. I got few people interested who mailed me off list showing interest to join in, and some praise mails as well. Thank You! But in the end, it worked out the people I got who were prepared for the workout could not be present at the event, hence remotely over IRC!

I reached Bangalore on Sunday, 2 days before the event just because I was paranoid the flight might get cancelled again, as what happened at mukt.in And as I left to Delhi, on the way I figured I had forgot my laptop’s charger Awesome no? And did I mention, I had my HDD crashed just while I was packing my stuff and fixing GRUB entries of the dual boot. Finally wiped off completely and installed *just* Ubuntu and left.

So after the chilly Delhi climate, Bangalore’s weather was pleasant and I loved it! Reached the hotel and started what? Charger hunting! Asking people if they had a Thinkpad charger. No Luck! So first day, I spent watching TV and talking to people on phone. Luckily, I went to meet my old friends at some opposite corner in Bangalore to help me with the hunting late at 7 and I while hopping shops, I figured I had a school friend staying in this area. Called her to check, if she knew any shops who sold laptop stuff. She asked me what model I had, and said if the Lenovo models will work. I said, yeah it will. And she had one & brought it, and guess what!, it worked!! So she was happy to lend it to me for a week and sacrifice her movie watching for the time being in return of a treat which I duly gave her before leaving Bangalore. In fact, she helped me get back to the airport as well by booking a cab! As I couldn’t get my internet working and as always, was at the last minute.

So finally I get back to the hotel and setup stuff for the workout and prepare my freshly installed Ubuntu with the dev environment.

Report

Prior to Day 1 (dinner) it was good to meet the speakers who had already arrived and talk to them. Got addressed by Atul & the Team@Foss.in members and got an idea of what to expect and what NOT and what is expected of us!

Day 1: I did manage to wake up early and leave ON time, to reach the venue, attended Harald’s keynote. And after that, I was always hanging around preparing for my workout on Day 2 at the FOSS Expo booths with the KDE guys! I also met fellow community guys, who agreed to help out during the workout with their participation. After the event, I came back to the hotel and post dinner, we sat and discussed things late night.

Day 2: Last night after discussions at the room with Piyush Verma, who works on Mobile/SMS stuff and have good experience in the field, we had the plan setup to go and hack on! Along with Nirmaya Lahiri, a new contributor who joined the Sahana list from Kolkata a few days back and was ready to work along over the IRC. At the hall, I was sruprised to see few guys already present before time and were setting up stuff after reading the wiki page. That was great! and unexpected That sure felt good. So we had:

• Nandeep Maali, GSoC 2008, Sarai, New Delhi. [irc]
• Shantanu Choudhary, from Sarai, New Delhi.
• Piyush Verma, KDE & Ex-GSoC 2007 student, New Delhi.
• Nirmalaya Lahiri, Kolkatta. [irc]
• Salil Kothadia, Bangalore.
• P.C. Kabeer, Kerala.
• Vivek Khurana, New Delhi.

who participated in the workout along with me and brainstormed on ideas to figure out the best way to solve the problems determined. We had some audience and friends present to support as well and watch the action as we discussed on the screen and the whiteboard (we used this a lot) . It was a nice session where the end result was no code, but solutions to solve the problem in a better way. Which needed further action and discussion to act upon, which is now being worked upon already! One thing we all felt, that we all were exhausted completely after the 2-5 pm, which went to 6 iirc, discussion and we had our much needed coffee break, before meeting again the next day to discuss and hack again.

Days 3-5: I had been hanging around whatever place I could get figuring out stuff to get to work, was joined by Kabir always and we would sit and do things on Sahana. Apart from that I would hang around with the KDE guys, meet other people chit-chat around. Practised the KDE song back at the hotel at night and danced on it, keeping everyone awake thinking that we were drunk, while we weren’t.

KDE Song late night practise

Met some *really* nice people, who were not only good hackers, but good & *friendly* people whom I had great fun with. I attended the KDE POTD and helped out in Piyush’s workout and attended Aanjhan’s workout as well. The day ended with an awesome ending keynote by Kalyan Verma, which left people thinking on issues related to the nature and wildlife, and the change we can be a part of.

Overall, this event was a great place for me to meet people whom you have talked to, but not met in person, meet new people, have fun, talk about Sahana and let people understand and know what FOSS can also do, in the form of Sahana.

Apart from seeing people getting kissed in public,

kushal at foss.in/2008 with some mysterious person

some using desperate measures & threatening to start contributing to their projects

Pradeepto, Join KDE or... !!

and some taking a time out of hacking

Aanjhan aka tuxmaniac taking a time out

… we had some great action and minds at work at the venue everywhere like this:

Minds at work at foss.in/2008

You can see the set of pictures from foss.in/2008 uploaded by everyone on Flickr and reports by others here.

The take home for me at foss.in/2008 was, meeting good people, getting to tell them about Sahana where it needs help, how its important for India to have an active community to work on, coming up with great new ideas to work/implement into Sahana and of course get more contributors, which I see is happening now As a developer the idea of having Workouts is indeed a useful one which I intend to replicate at other places as well. And this was the first time I was doing a development focussed activity for Sahana in India.

And of course this

foss.in/2008 t-shirt

We all love geeky shirts, more so special if it has your name on it!

Thanks to the people whom I met and the foss.in team who made this whole experience a wonderful and awesome one!

See you at foss.in/2009!