Monday, December 07, 2009
Foss.in 2009
"Go boldly where no FOSS has gone before" - Harald Welte
"Shut up and hack" - Philip Tellis
I guess these are the quotes that sum up what I take back from this year's edition of foss.in
The experience was simply mind-blowing. I have never seen so many people gather at a single place passionately DOING something. This time the focus wasn't so much on the talks but on hacking and getting something done and I did accomplish two things:
As usual when at a conference you get to meet lot of people. I consider myself fortunate enough to have met them. Some of these people I have heard about. Others I have communicated with in the past through e-mail or IRC when I hit a wall. But meeting them in person made a HUGE difference.
Some prominent people who I met this time:
1) Holger Freyther: My helpful WebKit Guru (aka zecke) who has given me good insight into webkit and hopefully I can contribute to this project. Currently Holger is busy optimizing Webkit for the beagleboard. (God level work!)
2) Harald Welte: The dude who is actually trying to change the world with his amazing work. What struck me most was this sentence during his keynote:"Would you like to hack a known protocol which has been done by hundreds of people or would you like to hack an unknown closed protocol and make an open source implementation of it?"
3) Russel Nelson: Showing me how we can solve complex problems using simple solutions like creating simple environmental sensors using the uncomplicated Arduino board.
4) Krishnakant Mane: Chief architect of an open source accounting package called GNU Khaata. He is visually impaired but I found him attentively listening to all the talks and asking the most intelligent questions. I hope I can contribute to his project.
5) Srinivas Raghavan: The creator of Anjal a light-weight webkit frontend for Evolution.
6) Debayan Banerjee: He hacks on an open source OCR called Tesseract and is busy adapting it to recognize Indic scripts. Was completely blown away by the work he's doing.
7) Mrinal Kalakrishnan: Met him after 4 years. His keynote about ROS (Robot OS) blew me away. The work done by him and others has just lowered the entry barrier for people interested in open source robotics.
8) Olivier Crete: The farsight developer who is making it simpler for us to make video conferencing apps on Linux.
9) Kartik Mistry: The Debian hacker who is responsible for bringing Indic scripts onto Linux.
10) Moinak Ghosh: The creator of Belenix which is now Open Solaris. Open Solaris' features have blown me away. I'm gonna convert...
There were a lot more people who I met and made friends with. They were the ones who made this conference all the more enjoyable because they were there during the workouts and hack sessions. :-)
There were interesting gadgets, contraptions and demos:
1) The ERLANG robot
2) The Nokia N900
3) The Nokia N900 remote controlled car.
4) Nano BTS
5) Adruino
What more can I say about this year's foss dot in? The choice of NIMHANS convention center as the venue was perfect. The auditoriums were world class. The food was yummy. The massive hack center on the first floor provided the perfect environment for collaboration during the workouts and hack sessions. Every small detail like providing liquid soap in the wash room was taken care of. I wasn't given any chance to complain!!! Three cheers to all of team fossdotin. :-)
One suggestion: while the wifi network was pretty good this time around with minimal disruptions; next year we should provide more wired connections in the hacker center and ask people to get their own patch cords to plug in.
The conference ended spectacularly with Mrinal's ROS keynote and The Raghu Dixit Project concert. Those who didn't attend the concert (and this year's foss.in), you better be jealous. Raghu Dixit is a true hacker who hacks Indian folk music to give it a contemporary flavour. His charisma gets any audience going along with him. I have attended numerous of his concerts and he manages to just charm the audience EVERY SINGLE TIME! His foss.in 2009 concert will be one of my most memorable ones.
Of course, there was a shocker in store, during the closing speech Atul Chitnis announced that this is his last conference as Project Lead in order to give more time to his family. It has been 10 years straight that he has been organizing foss.in. His contribution to foss.in is priceless. He will continue to be part of the foss.in team. It's time that a new generation took on responsibility for organizing foss.in.
He also highlighted that FOSS is important because there are lesser people who are looking into the core of the technology. They are only stuck in the upper APIs. This is dangerous. We need more people looking into how things work; pushing it beyond the limit and making it useful for everyone, that is called hacking. We also need more people to optimize existing FOSS technologies and reduce bloat.
I'm glad to have been part of this year's Foss.in. It will be the most memorable Foss.in I have had. So I would like to end with what Atul has said: "Foss is no longer experimental, we are mainstream now."
PS: Watch out for updates on this post. I will put up some photos. Otherwise follow my twitpic stream. :)
"Shut up and hack" - Philip Tellis
I guess these are the quotes that sum up what I take back from this year's edition of foss.in
The experience was simply mind-blowing. I have never seen so many people gather at a single place passionately DOING something. This time the focus wasn't so much on the talks but on hacking and getting something done and I did accomplish two things:
- Gave my VERY FIRST TALK at any conference which was on "Pushing the browser beyond limits". (more about this here)
- Ported an app I wrote sometime back onto the Nokia N900. (Special thanks to the Nokia developers: Abhijit Apte, Satish Kavoori and Chinmayi for helping me accomplish this.)
As usual when at a conference you get to meet lot of people. I consider myself fortunate enough to have met them. Some of these people I have heard about. Others I have communicated with in the past through e-mail or IRC when I hit a wall. But meeting them in person made a HUGE difference.
Some prominent people who I met this time:
1) Holger Freyther: My helpful WebKit Guru (aka zecke) who has given me good insight into webkit and hopefully I can contribute to this project. Currently Holger is busy optimizing Webkit for the beagleboard. (God level work!)
2) Harald Welte: The dude who is actually trying to change the world with his amazing work. What struck me most was this sentence during his keynote:"Would you like to hack a known protocol which has been done by hundreds of people or would you like to hack an unknown closed protocol and make an open source implementation of it?"
3) Russel Nelson: Showing me how we can solve complex problems using simple solutions like creating simple environmental sensors using the uncomplicated Arduino board.
4) Krishnakant Mane: Chief architect of an open source accounting package called GNU Khaata. He is visually impaired but I found him attentively listening to all the talks and asking the most intelligent questions. I hope I can contribute to his project.
5) Srinivas Raghavan: The creator of Anjal a light-weight webkit frontend for Evolution.
6) Debayan Banerjee: He hacks on an open source OCR called Tesseract and is busy adapting it to recognize Indic scripts. Was completely blown away by the work he's doing.
7) Mrinal Kalakrishnan: Met him after 4 years. His keynote about ROS (Robot OS) blew me away. The work done by him and others has just lowered the entry barrier for people interested in open source robotics.
8) Olivier Crete: The farsight developer who is making it simpler for us to make video conferencing apps on Linux.
9) Kartik Mistry: The Debian hacker who is responsible for bringing Indic scripts onto Linux.
10) Moinak Ghosh: The creator of Belenix which is now Open Solaris. Open Solaris' features have blown me away. I'm gonna convert...
There were a lot more people who I met and made friends with. They were the ones who made this conference all the more enjoyable because they were there during the workouts and hack sessions. :-)
There were interesting gadgets, contraptions and demos:
1) The ERLANG robot
2) The Nokia N900
3) The Nokia N900 remote controlled car.
4) Nano BTS
5) Adruino
What more can I say about this year's foss dot in? The choice of NIMHANS convention center as the venue was perfect. The auditoriums were world class. The food was yummy. The massive hack center on the first floor provided the perfect environment for collaboration during the workouts and hack sessions. Every small detail like providing liquid soap in the wash room was taken care of. I wasn't given any chance to complain!!! Three cheers to all of team fossdotin. :-)
One suggestion: while the wifi network was pretty good this time around with minimal disruptions; next year we should provide more wired connections in the hacker center and ask people to get their own patch cords to plug in.
The conference ended spectacularly with Mrinal's ROS keynote and The Raghu Dixit Project concert. Those who didn't attend the concert (and this year's foss.in), you better be jealous. Raghu Dixit is a true hacker who hacks Indian folk music to give it a contemporary flavour. His charisma gets any audience going along with him. I have attended numerous of his concerts and he manages to just charm the audience EVERY SINGLE TIME! His foss.in 2009 concert will be one of my most memorable ones.
Of course, there was a shocker in store, during the closing speech Atul Chitnis announced that this is his last conference as Project Lead in order to give more time to his family. It has been 10 years straight that he has been organizing foss.in. His contribution to foss.in is priceless. He will continue to be part of the foss.in team. It's time that a new generation took on responsibility for organizing foss.in.
He also highlighted that FOSS is important because there are lesser people who are looking into the core of the technology. They are only stuck in the upper APIs. This is dangerous. We need more people looking into how things work; pushing it beyond the limit and making it useful for everyone, that is called hacking. We also need more people to optimize existing FOSS technologies and reduce bloat.
I'm glad to have been part of this year's Foss.in. It will be the most memorable Foss.in I have had. So I would like to end with what Atul has said: "Foss is no longer experimental, we are mainstream now."
PS: Watch out for updates on this post. I will put up some photos. Otherwise follow my twitpic stream. :)
