Yet Another Yearly Pilgrimage!
Every year since 2006, I have been to FOSS MEET at NIT Calicut. Its a fun conference full of students from all across Calicut and the state of Kerala. Its one of my favourite conference, though it happens in March generally which means its starting to get warmer there in Calicut. This year, the conference happened last weekend ( 4,5, 6th April ) after a few hiccups - exams, clashing schedule and much more but it did happen finally. Lots of speakers and organisations backed due that reason. I wasn't sure if I would participate this time around. But just about 4-6 days prior to the event Hari Vishnu and his gang somehow convinced me to come there. I managed to trick Kartik Mistry into changing his plans of not attending the conference. My good friend Aanjhan was going to be there as well. So it was worth it.
On my request, the NITC folks were kind enough to book my flights instead of me booking them and then getting it reimbursed later. A huge thanks to them for the same.
I took the day flight to Calicut from BOM, reached exactly 45 minutes before my talk :). Kept my bag in the campus hostel. And went straight to my talk venue. My talk was going to start right after the Open Office BoF that Vikram Vincent was conducting. Meanwhile, I made sure the laptop and the projector worked fine - not that I was going to use any slides :) but I had a different idea. Soon, the delegates joined in as well. Some of them were known faces from last year, but lots of them were new. Plus the usual culprits like Kartik, Aanjhan, Hiren and others. Oh and I met this guy called Madhusudan, a student from Bangalore. He had contacted me last year regarding SoC and wasn't sure how to go about it. We had discussed it then, the dude worked on his skills the whole year and this year is participating in SoC for Hurd and one real time operating system. I got opportunity to read his proposal this year which he had sent for a review, quite well done I must say. It was great meeting him for the first time.
My idea was do a talk about various avenues to contribute to KDE since the most known/talked about topic is mostly developer centric one. So I talked about wonderful artists,terrific translators, documentation masters, marketing dudes, bug triage champs , hackers of course and more. I started with development considering the audience present. I stressed on Junior Jobs (JJs) which are lower entry points into KDE development. How can new people get introduced to KDE code base under mentorship of experienced hackers by taking up JJs? Went on talk about translators, thankfully had Kartik to help me out. Spoke about other avenues. The whole talk was pretty much interactive and I kept asking questions and taking questions as I went on. Lots of interesting questions were asked, some wanted to contribute but often didn't know where to start or how to start. So the talk fitted the audience well. Oh and I distributed some KDE t-shirts :).
After my talk there was a small gap for sometime during which I spoke to these enthusiastic chaps who had more questions, we exchanged email ids. We had a small impromptu BoF. It was Aanjhan's talk next who talked about "FOSS in Electronics". Best part was a he demoed Qucs among other things during his talk. I just love that application. :). After the talks, we went to the hostel and move to the guest house, the usual place where I have stayed during my last two visits. Kartik and Aanjhan had a car at their disposal so we went to the city to have dinner. We chose Malabar Palace since we had food there as well last time. The same place where the famous fresh lime soda incident happened. We had a lot of discussions over dinner. Appams and chicken step for dinner ... mmmm :) ( one of the most important motivation to be in Kerala ) . Kartik showed me a few debian packaging tricks at the guesthouse. By then I was very tired and pretty much half asleep.
Next morning we met Niyam Bhushan at the breakfast table. We spoke for a long time about various things including, why Niyam takes impromptu interviews of people and notes those down in his PDA Phone using his funky bluetooth keyboard.:). After that, Aanjhan, Kartik and yours truly did a collaborative talk on doing college projects using collaborative means. Basically we talked about wiki, irc, mailing lists, svn, bugzilla and how they can use those for their college projects and learn those simple rules which in turn educates them partly in becoming good FOSS citizens. Those simple things are often misunderstood or not even spared a thought. Often they are suddenly taken to kernel programming or some framework or some other such thing. Often the delegates get all excited about it, but they face the first block when they come across the daily tools that most of us use for our FOSS work or otherwise. Our talk went really smoothly, though I think we were a bit apprehensive since none of us had done a such a collaborative talk before. We demoed the tools as we went on explaining them how and why. Kartik did some nice Gujarati translation commits to the KDE trunk while demoing svn. We got many questions and that was encouraging.
After the talk, I bid farewell to the friends and organisers there and left for the airport almost immediately. I didn't really have to wait at the airport, I had already done a webcheckin. Flew back to Mumbai, reached right on time.
It was another year of job well done by FOSS@NITC team. It was great to see them all happy. We could see the sense of relief because of all the delays and the problems with the event. Well done chaps, see you next year. Aanjhan has reported it here and Kartik has done it here.
On my request, the NITC folks were kind enough to book my flights instead of me booking them and then getting it reimbursed later. A huge thanks to them for the same.
I took the day flight to Calicut from BOM, reached exactly 45 minutes before my talk :). Kept my bag in the campus hostel. And went straight to my talk venue. My talk was going to start right after the Open Office BoF that Vikram Vincent was conducting. Meanwhile, I made sure the laptop and the projector worked fine - not that I was going to use any slides :) but I had a different idea. Soon, the delegates joined in as well. Some of them were known faces from last year, but lots of them were new. Plus the usual culprits like Kartik, Aanjhan, Hiren and others. Oh and I met this guy called Madhusudan, a student from Bangalore. He had contacted me last year regarding SoC and wasn't sure how to go about it. We had discussed it then, the dude worked on his skills the whole year and this year is participating in SoC for Hurd and one real time operating system. I got opportunity to read his proposal this year which he had sent for a review, quite well done I must say. It was great meeting him for the first time.
My idea was do a talk about various avenues to contribute to KDE since the most known/talked about topic is mostly developer centric one. So I talked about wonderful artists,terrific translators, documentation masters, marketing dudes, bug triage champs , hackers of course and more. I started with development considering the audience present. I stressed on Junior Jobs (JJs) which are lower entry points into KDE development. How can new people get introduced to KDE code base under mentorship of experienced hackers by taking up JJs? Went on talk about translators, thankfully had Kartik to help me out. Spoke about other avenues. The whole talk was pretty much interactive and I kept asking questions and taking questions as I went on. Lots of interesting questions were asked, some wanted to contribute but often didn't know where to start or how to start. So the talk fitted the audience well. Oh and I distributed some KDE t-shirts :).
After my talk there was a small gap for sometime during which I spoke to these enthusiastic chaps who had more questions, we exchanged email ids. We had a small impromptu BoF. It was Aanjhan's talk next who talked about "FOSS in Electronics". Best part was a he demoed Qucs among other things during his talk. I just love that application. :). After the talks, we went to the hostel and move to the guest house, the usual place where I have stayed during my last two visits. Kartik and Aanjhan had a car at their disposal so we went to the city to have dinner. We chose Malabar Palace since we had food there as well last time. The same place where the famous fresh lime soda incident happened. We had a lot of discussions over dinner. Appams and chicken step for dinner ... mmmm :) ( one of the most important motivation to be in Kerala ) . Kartik showed me a few debian packaging tricks at the guesthouse. By then I was very tired and pretty much half asleep.
Next morning we met Niyam Bhushan at the breakfast table. We spoke for a long time about various things including, why Niyam takes impromptu interviews of people and notes those down in his PDA Phone using his funky bluetooth keyboard.:). After that, Aanjhan, Kartik and yours truly did a collaborative talk on doing college projects using collaborative means. Basically we talked about wiki, irc, mailing lists, svn, bugzilla and how they can use those for their college projects and learn those simple rules which in turn educates them partly in becoming good FOSS citizens. Those simple things are often misunderstood or not even spared a thought. Often they are suddenly taken to kernel programming or some framework or some other such thing. Often the delegates get all excited about it, but they face the first block when they come across the daily tools that most of us use for our FOSS work or otherwise. Our talk went really smoothly, though I think we were a bit apprehensive since none of us had done a such a collaborative talk before. We demoed the tools as we went on explaining them how and why. Kartik did some nice Gujarati translation commits to the KDE trunk while demoing svn. We got many questions and that was encouraging.
After the talk, I bid farewell to the friends and organisers there and left for the airport almost immediately. I didn't really have to wait at the airport, I had already done a webcheckin. Flew back to Mumbai, reached right on time.
It was another year of job well done by FOSS@NITC team. It was great to see them all happy. We could see the sense of relief because of all the delays and the problems with the event. Well done chaps, see you next year. Aanjhan has reported it here and Kartik has done it here.