On the track

Its been a bit late to start writing the report, many of the other fedora members and attendees for FUDCon KL have already blogged it a week ago. I was stuck through out last week, with office stuffs and little bit of my own work. During the days of FUDCon KL 2012 I was always picking up pointers to what I feel to be spoken about regarding FUDCon KL 2012. Its now time.

FUDCon Kl Day 1

Day 1 started with a call from the volunteers for getting down for breakfast. Breakfast ? wait I am still sleeping, but omg its 8:20 am and today starts FUDCon KL where the bus starts from 9:00 am !! Not any other different day for me, so from Bed to Shower and down for breakfast JIT. Today I didn’t have talk, though had to prepare a bit for the my slides on the 2nd day. So after having all kinds of non veg available for the breakfast all of us started for the UCTI campus (venue for #fudconkl2012).

The venue had lots of nice group of people attending and thronging registration desks. Starting from college guys to various professionals, crowd had a nice mix. Today’e keynote was given by Christoph Wickert (@cwickert) on “Leadership in Leaderless Organization”. You can have a look for the video here. The talk gave an insight upon how FOSS and Fedora as such have leaders, but still they are different than the leadership in traditional organizations and their lines of thought. After the keynote @KageSenshi started the call for Barcamp style sessions for Day 1. To my surprise, there were at least 30 sessions pitched which forced to reduce the length of sessions from 1 hr to 30 mins. Few sessions were gr8 to listen to and work upon, specially Fedora documentation by Joshua Wulf (@sitapati), LaTeX by @FranciscoD, Agile System Testing by @rtnpro (Though few things went above my head).

Lunch in between was for quite long time, me , kushal, rtnpro and Michel sat together and discussed about FOSS and Linux events in general. Michel and me shared thoughts on PhD and the subject of interests we did share. @rtnpro being out of his Den to abroad first time he was not at all satisfied with what he was eating as a vegetarian. He still needed “Dal, Rice and Aalu Siddho” [Lentils, Rice and Boiled Potatoes] at least. This dream retained being one still he was back to his home in India I guess. In the meanwhile I was quitely preparing my slides with inputs from @mether for #AskFedora talk scheduled the next day. Day 1 did end after hectic barcamp schedule and to me, it was great to hear short and crisp topics within such short time. We reached back to hotel a bit late and then finished off my slides. After that it was only me and sleep

FUDCon Kl Day 2

It was the day for the scheduled sessions, and just after the keynote I had my two sessions (in two different rooms). The keynote for the day was given by Joshua Wulf (@sitapati) on Increasing the participation to FOSS. He stressed on really important points and explained it to a ease in his presentation. Community growth and participation was something he stressed upon in his talk and on the later half did show newbies that how to contribute to Fedora even if you are not a coder. His Fedora book was something very interesting and to make your hands dirty its best to at least start contributing and what else than a documentation. After the keynote I ran across the 3rd Floor room, I had my first presentation on “Fedora in Education” and how to get involved in it. There were few people during the start, and after 10 minutes or so it did sprung up. My age old Acer again refused to get connected to the projector and I had to borrow @rtnpro’s laptop for the presentation. I spoke about all the prospective areas where Fedora is used in Education and newbies who does have a knack or love for contribution, this can be their starting point. People did show some enthusiasm and asked me about few details about how to start contributing. Soon after my first session I ran to the AUDITORIUM for my 2nd one regrading #AskFedora. Main aim of this presentation was to let the awareness of a Fedora Q/A platform seep through the minds of people developing and using it. The need of having such a Q/A platform is to get the user experience , problems getting captured and thus be able to create a documentation full of solutions to real life scenarios. In the end of session I was able to get at least 2 people who were django developers and were willing to contribute to #AskFedora upstream #askbot. Me and @rtnpro had long lasting discussions regarding how to increase contributions and people joining and helping in #AskFedora. Next in Line was the presentation by @maktrix and @rtnpro about localization, crowdsourcing and transifex. After two sessions and several other sessions of transifex from @rtnpro, I must say my interest has grown a lot towards the localization platform and specially Transifex being a pioneer to it. After all these a small break and then some Lightning talks, believe me it was the catch for the day. @cwickert -> LXDE session let me start using LXDE after that I have not regretted a single moment for switching from GNOME 3 to LXDE. Another gr8 talk from @cwickert was about the cloud, and the way he presented it, nobody took eyes of the slide. Lot of other witty and informational talks also went in parallel and everybody in the crowd thoroughly enjoyed it. It was like a stress buster from a menu of scheduled sessions.

And the most important FUDPub was to be held today, but here in KL it was Buffet of a variety of food which was served and people satisfied there taste buds with those . After the food @cwickert came in his Beefy Miracle costume and so did the Fedora logo ed cakes to celebrate the release of F17 (Beefy Miracle). Cake was mainly smashed into each others face, thanks to the Cake war started by @kushal. It ended in people throwing other food and drinks too, and soon people started running to avoid getting cakes smashed into face. It was lot of fun and may be best ever FUDPub without any alcohol

FUDCon Kl Day 3

After FUDPub or rather FOODCon, @me, @kushal and @rtnpro started having thoughts on doing some random hacks or a brainstorm to develop something short and sweet and pretty useful. @kushal after showing his King like stature in #cakewar , finally thought of doing something useful and he was pretty harsh on the deadlines as he thought something to be delivered as 1st revision, the next day. Life is not always in peace and calmness. We jammed (code) till midnight and came up to display and redesign the vision in which System logs are presented to normal or generic users who uses Linux just for browsing and day to day work. To dedicate the birth of this small tool in Malaysia we named it “tlogt” or “TowerlogTower” [inspired from the Petronas Towers]. This logs as of now only parses the Boot and the Secure logs and delivers it in a much presentable way. Me and Kushal are busy in writing the parsers whereas rtnpro is the guy responsible for creating the whole django UI. Kushal slept a bit early but me and @rtnpro made it sure at least the milestone set for that night is fulfilled before we surrender ourselves to the sleep Goddess.

Next day morning me and @rtnpro both were not in mood to attend the morning sessions as our heads were still jammed with “tlogt” We managed to pursue @maktrix and all of us went to visit KLCC Aquaria. After that short trip we came back to UCTI for the afternoon hack sessions and bof’s. Again did sit for the same old and oldest session on Python basics taken by Kushal, probably the nth time. Kushal is recursive tutorial book on Python and he loves doing it

Abu Mansar Manaf gave the closing keynote and really boosted people regarding “FOSS and contributions made to it” in 15 minutes (that too without slides). In the rest of the #hack sessions I was still fiddling with “tlogt” code as I am quite a newbie in Python (rather this stands as my first code in python ). The day ended in Galaxy Tab raffles and the two winners were happy as ever. In the evening snack we got the beefy miracle (though it was chicken, so we could eat it) and people enjoyed having it. After that there were numerous photo shoots, group, single, few , few more and what not. All photos can be found in Flickr (search for #fudconkl2012). The links to the event reports for this FUDCon and related pictures can be found out in a single Wiki page (thanks to Ankur).

After the event end we had a sumptuous dinner covering Malaysian delicacies. Here “we” in the last line was all the organizers, along with Kushal, me, Micheal, rtnpro. It was fun specially because of the nice company of people and excellent food. Kushal, me and fellow fedorans from Srilanka did have flight at morning 6:00 am from KL. So @rtnpro, @kage and all others did see us off and we did start for the journey bidding adieu to KL and Sri Petaling Hotel (that’s where we stayed for the last few days).

Every good things come to an end, and so did FUDCon KL 2012. A definite worthy and notable praise for @KageSenshi and his few member team of powerhouse performance people, else it would not be feasible for drawing and successfully completing a International event in such small notice period. Made a lot of new friends, @kaio, @seatux86, @Gurdip, @hircus, @MavJS and probably many others whom I know much by face than by name. Somehow Fedora family never makes me feel that I am new and unknown to any event, its always like a group of known people and faces probably you are meeting in person for the first time.