ervin’s piece of web

My last evening in Bangalore has been spent at Atul’s place
with all the other speakers around and the organization team
for the “Speaker Party”. Once again great food, and great people
to discuss with.

I left a bit early with Till, Volker, Christian, Kartik and
Sheela. I got back to the hotel with Kartik while Till, Volker
and Christian left to the airport to take their plane.

This way I had some sleep, and early in the morning I got a
car sent by the organizers to get to the airport. Had my flight
for Mumbai with no problem, and arrived in time. I have to
admit that Mumbai airport is much bigger and cleaner than the
Bangalore one. There, Pradeepto was waiting for me and picked
me up to go to a hotel in Panvel (a small town near Mumbai).
I’m staying there for the next few days because I’m attending
Pradeepto’s wedding.

This post is officially the last one about FOSS.in 2007. But
likely not my last one from India this year, I’ll probably blog
about Mumbai and the wedding. As for FOSS.in, I have a short list
of things which I’ll definitely remember (in no particular
order):

• Most of the talks are all done by high profile speakers…
  I even wonder how I got talks there. You definitely have the
  best people in their field coming here. The “who’s who” of the
  Indian Free Software contributors is there, but you also have
  quite a lot of famous international Free Software contributors.
  If you don’t believe me, look at this year speakers list but
  also past years… I hardly know any other conference with such
  speaker lists (except maybe FOSDEM).
• The organization team is just awesome and I’ll really miss
  them all. Lovely and interesting people… I admit I was a bit
  heart broken when I had to leave the speaker party. I’m looking
  forward to meet them all again.
• The party at Opus, nice karaoke club, terrific atmosphere…
  and Shlipa learning how to count people when drunk (I’ll never let
  you forget this moment). @Shreyas: No need to smile while reading
  this, you were half drunk too, remember?
• The high quality of the organization (the organizers again, but
  also the volunteers and the logistics around the conference), it
  was just perfect. I’ve been speaker in quite a few conferences, and
  I’ve never seen something like this. As a speaker, you’re never let
  on your own, you always get help for anything, and you can feel it’s
  all done with a great pleasure. In short: it’s the best organized
  conference I’ve ever been to. And I don’t see another one beating this
  team anytime soon.

Last day of FOSS.in I had some network problems, and I’ve been
left with almost no access since then. Hence why I’m blogging this
only now and the entry will be slightly short.

The last two days were marked by a few talks I attended.
Particularly, Danese Cooper talk was brilliant, she’s one of the best
speakers I know. This talk was very interesting, and relevant to most
people employed to work on Free Software. How to keep your ethics. How
to make your employer move forward in the right direction. Are important
part of the equation now that we see more and more companies involved
in Free Software development.

Of course other outstanding talks were the ones by Till and Volker
about Akonadi. Very well done guys! It gave me a very good overview of
what Akonadi is, and how to develop with it. I already claimed in the past
that I would never ever work on the kdepim codebase… Honestly they
gave me the will to work on Akonadi based PIM stuff which is a small
miracle. Akonadi really looks like the way to go for PIM: shareable accross
desktops, lightweight yet powerful, a nice and clean API taking care of years
of experience from our PIMsters. Congrats to everybody involved.

Last but not least, the talk from Andrew Cowie about how to become
a contributor was quite nice too. The idea to do it along with Shreyas was
terrific, it gave a very entertaining talk. Too bad there was too much content
for the allocated slot and they had technical issue at the beginning of the talk.
They had to rush in the end, which is unfortunate for such an important topic.

Finally, we had the official closing of the conference, it started with a
talk by Rusty Russell. Basically he was asked to give a talk which would give
everybody the will to become a contributor. Then, he came up with the very nice
idea to explain is own story, and to invite other kernel hackers to do the same.
After that he invited Sheela on stage and she made her first patch to the kernel
in live. That patch was sent on the relevant lists, we learnt later that it
got applied and will be shipped in the next kernel… Yes, that was that easy!
In the end of his talk he invited almost all the attendance on the stage: contributors,
users, people knowing developers, etc.

Atul then got on stage to the closing talk, he invited a few people to talk about
other indian conferences and events around Free Software. There’s so much potential
here that it’s really nice to see some dynamics around this topic in India.

It was the opening day for the conference part of the event. Very nice introduction by Atul in my opinion. The keynote was nice too, getting some insights about Anjuta development, where it came from etc.

Then, I attended Holger’s talk about Open Embedded, interesting stuff too. It really shows the difficulties of having to deal with small devices and how it impacts the community.

After lunch (ah! great food again!), I hanged into the Hacking Room for most of the afternoon showing bits of KDE, discussing the design, trying to give information on how to get started with some of our frameworks. Nice and interesting people were here to discuss. Because of that I missed the QtWebKit talk by Simon, but it was worth it.

And finally, I had my last presentation, about the student projects we did last year in my University (and we have a sequel running this year), it had some exclusive data in it on how it’s going this year. I got really nice feedback to this talk, truely nice to see so many students and a few professors in the room. There’s definitely some will to replicate this and I’d love to help such efforts. We’ll see where it goes…

Since the first day of the conference was over, we moved to a restaurant… Followed by some of the organizers, we ended up being 20 people in there. Was a traditional “on the banana leaf” restaurant. Great people (again), awesome food (again)… I ended the day full and happy!

Daily report from FOSS.in (at least I try). It was the day were we had the KDE project day, so I was of course hanging in the KDE room all day. Unfortunately it was a quite remote room, which didn’t make it easy to find us, but we had our share of people, and at least we were sure they were motivated to find us.

Overall we had nice talks, and of course nice questions. I’m not that happy with my talks too, I think I somehow missed the target audience, but I learnt from this and will do better next time.

In the evening we had a nice party in a karaoke bar. The food was great, the people too. At the end of the party one of the organizer was drunk, she had to count us ten times to know how many taxis to get. In the end we had our taxi and went back to the hotel.

For those wondering: no, I won’t give the name of the drunk organizer for her own sake… I’ve been told it’d be disclosed by other bloggers anyway.

I got my flight to Bangalore yesterday after a night in a cheap hotel near CDG airport. In case you’d wonder: yes CDG airport is still as bad as usual… For instance I met Till and Volker there and we didn’t manage to buy wifi time there. Their portal was sooo confusing…

Anyway, we just sit in the plane and after a few hours (with a headache for me) we arrived safely in Bangalore airport. No bagage got lost so after a bit of waiting we got out of the airport. There, Atul and a couple of other people from FOSS.in organization.

We crashed out at the hotel and woke up ready for the first day of the conference. After breakfast we got to the venue which is a nice building in my opinion. I used my day to keep up with mail, prepare myself for tomorrow talks, add the final touch to my main conference talk and discuss with people. It’s really nice to meet them, lot of nice folks!

The lunch break was great too (I could I come here without talking about food?). I really enjoyed it, veggie and spicy! We also got joined by Danese Cooper and a few other people, the discussions were very interesting. Last but not least that’s the time when the famous Pradeepto joined us. Always a pleasure to see him!

Now leaving for dinner… Later people!