FUDCon↔FUNCon @ Pune 2011

There are many things you remember once an event is over and then there are some which are etched on your mind. I’ll always remember everyone saying thanks for the artwork and the Tee design. I was happy and thoroughly excited to see the Fedora Design team’s efforts plastered all over the venue! And oh yes! above all, Kashyap‘s geekish quote of the event, “That’s nested bullshit!” will always remain the identifying bit for this FUDCon.

Day1

I missed half of it, thanks to Air India and the morons who were dancing on the Trivandrum Airport runway and caused a 12 hour flight delay. I entered the COEP auditorium only at the exact moment when Sitaram’s Gitolite talk came to an end. Being a TCS guy now, I felt proud to have him on the venue 🙂 I had a small chat with Sitaram and he as confused about my name (as its Dutt/Sharma sometimes, somewhere) I told him that I chop my name sometimes so that others don’t get intimidated by the string array overflow in my name 😛 I was escorted to the speaker’s lounge where I met Shravan, Saleem, Kushal, Arun SAG, Siddhesh, Shakthi and Aditya Patwari. Ankur Sinha Vaidik and Ratnadeep were among the new folks I had met and got along with well due to the familiar geek chemistry we all share. Satya, PJP and Rahul also greeted me and I was among the titans by now. Both of my talks were scheduled for the next day and I had to get some stuff/codes from my lab. So mostly I missed the other sessions on day one too.

Day2

I came on time for Harish’s talks and grabbed some swag from Saleem and went off to Seminar Hall where my talk was scheduled. I could mostly see people I already knew sitting among the attendees. There were some new students who seemed interested too and were listening intently. I had expected 20-25 attendees and got what I wanted 🙂 My talk was well received and a few guys actually came to ask some stuff. I immediately knew that a hackfest/workshop kind of stuff for them was essential to keep the inquisitiveness alive. I listened intently to Siji’s talk on Disko UI framework for embedded devices and then had a chat with my long time Embedded Nirvana buddy Chaitannya for quite sometime. We discussed about Siji’s talk for a while and then lots of other awesome stuff at length. I went to speakers lounge thereafter and started preparing for the Fedora Design session I had to eventually take. I intended to get more people involved in design activities related to Fedora by at least demoing them how I remixed art to create some graphics for this FUDCon.

I say FUD! You say CON!

The day also went by and I spent some time in speaker’s lounge preparing for hackfest tomorow before hitting the FUDPub!! Now this was the most interesting part of Day 2. It was truly an amazing experience to see Kushal dancing around and Rahul all energized and shouting Hey-you-bugger all the time. We later in the evening had a round table humour conference, where Rahul was pulling anyone’s leg whom he could get hold of. The rooftoop FUDPub was indeed a unique experience with Eugene and Jared Smith dancing to bollywood numbers while Shrishti discussed Arun’s baby pink slippers and Aditya telling me about Arun’s biceps and his screwdriver dreams! (sorry Arun I had to write that :P)

Day3

This was the workshop/hackfest day! This is what I was looking for at last. I knew some people might be interested and even if they were not, I managed to get at least half a dozen enthusiastic guys and girls for a Qt/Embedded Linux workshop we had. (I was planning to actually hijack other’s hackfests to get some people for mine but time and tide were merciful to the others it seems)

Thanks to Shakthi for the pic

We sat around in a circle in the auditorium and stared with basics of embedded Linux and then towards Qt application development on embedded devices. I had lots of interruptions wherein I had to go repeatedly with Saleem to get the awesome Fedora cake done 🙂 (say thanks to us!) However I managed to show the workshop attendees a demo code cross-compiled and run on my rooted android device before we wrapped up the conference.  We went for a dinner later in the evening after having Rahul’s hey-you-bugger rounds once more at the hotel and laughing our asses off.

I had always been reading something about the Fedoraproject and its values since I got involved in it – Freedom, Friends, Feaures, First! This FUDCon was indeed the first time I was able to experience the true meaning of these words as the event went by. Love you guys (and girls) See you all soon!

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