Avinash Joshi's Musings

It was a hectic day!

Aghosh and I got up at 4 in the morning, to get going on a 3 hour journey to Ernakulam to attend the fossmeet @ mec just because Atul Chitnis, Shreyas and Santosh – the major players in foss were coming to speak there. I was lot more excited as I could get to meet Atul and Shreyas in person so that I could ask them for help regarding our proposal to conduct a FOSS Conference (or a fossmeet) @ Amrita.

We boarded a bus that left Vallikavu, the junction nearest to our hostel at 5:30 am. We reached Ernakulam at 8:30am, had a quick breakfast and then got into a bus to MEC (Model Engineering College, Thrikkakkara). We were late. We reached MEC @ 10am, but upon enquiry at the Registration desk we were glad to hear that Atul had not yet reached the venue due to delay in his flight arrival time by an hour or so. I was happy as I could hear to the full talk delivered by Atul

The much awaited talk from Atul started at 11 a.m. and he continued to speak until 12 noon on “FOSS in your Career”. It was a mindblowing talk – This was exactly the talk and points that I wanted so that I could convince my juniors and friends that FOSS is THE best place to learn! The one important thing that I learnt from his talk is that

we, as a part of the Free and OpenSource world must be adaptive and must include everyone (even if it is proprietary) as the concept of inclusion is the key in the OpenSource world. Only if we include the proprietary software format, will people start loving FOSS. FOSS is all about inclusion.

Second talk was by Santosh (Hacking the Language), after lunch. It was on Localisation and how to Contribute. He also spoke about the GSOC project. It was great.

Later, Shreyas spoke on “The charm of learning new things with Open Source”. It was great, short and a quick talk on how you can fall into deep shit in the FOSS world and how your code reviewers will tell you only these thing – “You Suck” “Your Code Sucks” and so on. But you must keep trying and not give up, as it is in the FOSS world that you learn the most!

Last, we had a hands on session on Blender by Zadeeq.

On the whole, this foss meet was really great. Among the participants, there were almost 30 students from my College!!!(Again max participation).

After the meet, Aghosh and I walked back 5 kms to take a bus to the nearest bus stand. While travelling in the bus, we thought that we could try looking for a train to Kayankulam. So we got down at the Ernakulam North Station and went to enquire about the train timings, but in vain. (You must note that all this while I was under high pressure and did not feel like going to the toilets @ MEC coz they were really SICK). We came out of the station and had a cup of tea, got a bus from the North station to the South station(junction). There we learnt that the next train to Kayankulam was at 11pm!! Gosh! That’s too late. So we walked down 3 kms again to the main bus stand (with the pressuere increasing). At the bus stand, we found a COMFORT ZONE(Toilet) where we finally could relieve ourselves…! Wah! that felt better. We then boarded a bus to Ochira, where we had our dinner. We reached hostel at 10:20 pm, finally.

Looking back, it was a day spent well……