INDIA FOSS 2.0 : A First Year Perspective
India Foss 2.0 was held on the 23rd and 24th of July at NIMHANS, Bangalore and it was our first tech conference. Even though our seniors had assured us that they’d guide us and help us in networking with all the cool and important people out there, we were quite apprehensive. As first years with hardly any idea about what was about to happen and not even sure if we’ll understand half of the things that would be discussed there, we were pretty scared but equally excited.
Talks
The talks took place in two different Auditoriums and each had different sessions going on simultaneously so it was a tough task to choose between the topics as they were equally new and exciting.
The first talk session we attended was “Introducing Mon School” by Jannat Patel. Mon School is a not-for-profit online platform for learning programming. She talked about how it’ll help a wider group of people to get started with programming and also urged people to contribute to Mon School.
“Fireside chat with Rudra Saraswat: 12 year old Linux dev” was one of our favourite sessions. This 12 year old boy is an official Ubuntu member, and the Creator/Project Lead of: Ubuntu Unity Remix, at such a young age and is also managing other activities like tabla classes and exams on the side. The interviewer was Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha and it was such a warm chat session which left us all motivated to do more.
Talks such as “Building Dictionaries, Open Data Open source” by the CTO of Zerodha, “Foss Mobile UPI APP” by Nemo, “Scanning is the New Spinning” by Om Shiv Prakash L, “Chaos genius” by Harshit Surana etc although extremely technical talks, filled us with a variety of new ideas, inspirations for new projects and most of all, encouraged us to learn and explore more into these fields.
A presentation that really got us interested was “India’s Soft Corner for Software Patents: an empirical study” led by Raghav Ahooja. Mr Ahooja did the presentation in such a way that it highlighted the issue at hand and conveyed its seriousness correctly, but in a way that was humorous and fun, making it very engaging.
Flash Talks had an interesting queue of speakers and projects. We were really excited to see Aldrin Jension, IEDC MEC CTO, presenting.
Moosa Mehar M P’s talk about the TInkerhub Movement, its history, the community and the stats was really interesting. Hearing how humble the beginnings were and where they are now in outreach is very commendable. Mr. Mehar also shared some disheartening statistics about unemployment in India/Kerala and the unemployability of engineering graduates, as well as some of the limitations of women in Tech and how they hope that Tinkerhub and organisations like this will be able to mitigate this gap.
Swags, fun and food!
One of the things we had a lot of fun doing was interacting with the different sponsors, doing all the fun quizzes and puzzles and getting popcorn, t-shirts, mugs, books and stickers. We are sure to hoard these souvenirs forever.
Food provided on both days (Breakfast, Lunch, Tea and Snack) was amazing and we even had 3 desserts during lunch! Did not miss home at all!
It was during the sessions that we realised many projects were hiring developers! An opportunity we otherwise wouldn’t have been exposed to. Although a lot of us weren’t qualified right on the spot, it gave us something to look forward to.
Networking and meeting people
With the help of our seniors we were able to interact with really important people like Andrew Bastin, Co Founder and CTO of Hoppscotch and Sooraj, a Senior Software Engineer at Hasura, at their stall, and talked about how their service accelerates the MVP building process. We are extremely thankful to all the seniors who were there at the venue, guiding and helping us throughout.
India FOSS 2.0 was a wonderful opportunity for us to meet new people and listen to talks and presentations by such amazing personalities. We feel very lucky to have had such a massive exposure in our first year and we will surely be looking forward to attending India FOSS 3.0.
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