This year’s FUDCon for the APAC region was held once more in the same city of Pune. Attending FUDCon reminded me of 2011 – the last time this event was in Pune. I had submitted some talks and sessions as I still feel more of an APAC guy even though I have changed zones for sometime now. Hoping that there would be enough folks interested to know what I have been working on for the last couple of years, I submitted a talk “Kernel and Userspace tracing with LTTng and friends”. You can see the slides here. Of course, systems performance consumes most of my waking hours and I thought that it would benefit Fedora as well. I was happy when I saw that the talk was selected and there was an opportunity for me to share my experiences with others in Pune. Along with this talk I was also going to take a Kenrel module workshop and AskFedora UX/UI hackfest that me and Sarup decided to run. I knew that my FUDCon would be packed 🙂
I arrived on 24th night, all jetlagged and tired from a long journey. I met Izhar and Somvannda at Mumbai and we all set out for Pune. To our surprise, Siddhesh and Kushal were waiting for our arrival at 3am in the hotel. Thanks guys for your seamless efforts in co-ordinating travel for speakers! (and of course a whole lot of other things you did). We quickly hit the sack. Most of the next day was spent in doing some chores for FUDCon organization – packing the goodie bags with Ani and Danishka at Siddhesh’s house. We went to the Red Hat Pune office subsequently where I met Jared, Shreyank, Prasad, Harish, Sinny et al.
Also, as you can see, Izhar was not afraid of some fizzy-drinks fireworks in the RH office as well. Chillax. It was just a photo-op 🙂
Day 1
I had a very small selection of talks to attend. The day started with Harish’s keynote and then a Education panel discussion. I soon diverted to some other talks. I started with the kdump and kernel crash analysis workshop by Buland Singh and Gopal Tiwari. Their slides and explaination was good but unfortunateley the demo failed. I moved on to Sinny’s presentation on ABI compatability. This one was delivered quite well IMO. I wanted to attend Vaidik’s Vagrant talk but settled on for Samikshan’s talk on his “spartakus” tool to detect kernel ABI breakages. It was something done based on the “sparse” tool. I went to the FUDCon APAC BoF next to see how palnning was being done. I don’t remember exactly but probably the day ended with a visit to a local microbrewery.
Day 2
I met Sankarshan after a long time. He was manning the Fedora booth like a soldier in the vanguard. I also saw the FUDCon T-shirts that I designed today. They looked quite well done which of course made me happy. I picked up some FUDCoins (aka Fedora pin-badges). Legend (me) says that you can not buy worldly stuff but just pure emotions with such coins. I soon moved to the opening keynote by Jiri was nice – mostly becasue he told us that the mp3 paptent was expiring soon and possibly Fedora would support mp3 soon out of the box. Next was my talk on tracing. Dunno how that went, but some folks met me in the end demanding the copy of Brendan’s performance tools cheat-sheet. Felt nice that people there cared about this 🙂 HasGeek folks tell me that the videos will be available soon. By that time, here are the slides. I continued to Pravin’s talk on Internationalization – quite nice, and then to an old friend Kiran’s talk on Wifi internals. This one was sufficiently detailed and quite informative. I then went on to deliver a workshop on Kernel module programming where I basically started with a simple hello world module and ended with a netfilter hooks based small packet filter. Some first year students from Amrita univeristy looked very enthusiastic. They even met me and asked me how to begin kernel programming. I was impressed how much pumped up they were even in the first year about kernel proramming!
Look who’s trying to bore people to death
This day ended with the customary FUDPub. We also spent the night talking late at night about life universe and everything with Sinny and Charul – while seeing a buzzed Sarup struggling to make coffee and tea for us as he intermittently poured in his inputs 🙂 This was somewhat like the famous pink slippers incident of FUDCon 2011
Best. FUDPub. Ever.
I don’t think I can explain how awesome a FUDPub can be when you have awesome food, drinks and a whole bowling alley booked for the volunteers and speakers. It was truly awesome. We all agreed that this has set a threshold for all the future FUDPubs now!
Day 3
The last day was more of hackfests and some workshops such as Docker workshop by Aditya, Lalatendu and Shivprasad (which I did not attend, but have been told that it was really good). I however attended a really good workshop on Inkscape by Sirko and then a small part of the Blender workshop by Ryan Lerch. It was nice seeing some folks pouring in with their Blender model renders in Harish’s keysigning party and looking content with they dancing cube 🙂 I am sure Ryan did an awesome job in showing them the power of Blender! I was tired by this time and the attendance was thinning, but me and Sarup still managed the AskFedora hackfest. There were a few folks but still we managed to get some good feedback on the UI done till now by our GSoC student Anuradha from particiapants Charul and Sinny. I have to prepare a feedback soon for her so that she can make changes. We ended the day with yet another long night of discussions with Siddhesh, Kushal, Charul, Sarup and Sinny.
In the end, I would say – it was an awesome event. The quality of talks was really good. I hope it benefited students and the industry folks that attended these. Also, Sarup is an all round awesome guy and a nice roommate. I will update this if I remember something more and if I manage to get some more photos from the event.
EDIT: Added photos. Venue and my talk photo shamelessly taken from Sinny’s photostream on Flickr.
Tuxology 