Professional Yak Shaver
It’s done. On September 13th, I said good bye to Bangalore after about 7.5 years of calling it my home
It’s done. On September 13th, I said good bye to Bangalore after about 7.5 years of calling it my home. It’s the city where I’ve lived the longest in one stretch. I’ll miss home.
Hello Delhi! I hope I don’t burn from your heat.
Image Credit: Henry Lawford on Flickr. CC-BY.
For the first time, I actually attended the OKFestival. I didn’t get to attend many sessions, but the conversations I’ve had are spectacular.
For the first time, I actually attended the OKFestival. I didn’t get to attend many sessions, but the conversations I’ve had are spectacular.
The first surprise was meeting malev. A couple of years ago, we both worked together on the Ubuntu project. Now, he’s an Open News Fellow and I work at Open Knowledge. The FOSS world is truely small 🙂
I finally got to meet Christie! I’ve heard of Christie since right before she started at Mozilla, when I first heard of Open Source Bridge, and later she started at Mozilla Webdev, where I was closely involved back then.
Georg came over to say hi on Tuesday. When I realized that he was in Uganda for the Mozfest East Africa, I introduced him to Ketty who was also there, leading to an interesting conversation and great connection.
George Sattler works for XVT solutions in Australia and is our partner. He is fairly certain that I don’t sleep 😉 We’ve been having conversations over email for quite a long time and it was great to meet George in person.
It’s been a long time since I’ve met Adam Green, the editor of Public Domain Review. It was nice catching up with him. Also, Joris! I hadn’t seen him since he moved on from OKF 🙂
I haven’t met Riju since he’s moved to Delhi and I met him in Berlin! Totally random and great running into him 🙂
The last I met Kaustubh was at Pranesh’s farewell party in October (?). We had a good time catching up.
Folks from local groups across OKF. As a part-time system, I talk to most of the OKF community folks at some point through RT. Additionally, I was going around asking feedback for the sysadmin team. It was great for me to put a face to names and I suspect vice versa as well.
The usual suspects who were great to meet, are of course, my lovely teammates. It’s nice to meet in person, grab a drink, and talk.
Congratulations again to Bea, Megan, Lou, and Naomi for making OKFestival happen!
On the last Monday of April, I found myself nervously standing in a room of about 15 people from the e-Government Agency and National Bureau of Statistics in Dar es Salaam. They were waiting for me to start training them in Python and CKAN. I’ve been programming in Python since 2011, but I’ve never actually trained people in Python. On the first day, I didn’t have any slides. All I had was one [PDF][pdf] from Wikibooks which I was using as material. I didn’t even cover the whole material. By the end of the day though, I could sense that it was sinking into the attendees a bit.
It all started with an email from my manager asking me if I was available to do a training in Tanzania in April. After lots of back and forth, we finalized on a date and a trainer to assist in the trainings, and I flew in. Dar es Salaam, strangely, reminded of growing up in Salalah. I got in a day early to prep for the week and settle in. The trainer looking groggy on a Monday does not bode well!
People who train often don’t tell you this – Trainings are exhausting. You’re most likely to be on your feet all day and walk around the room helping people who’re lagging behind. Looking back, the training was both fun and exhausting. I enjoyed talking about Python, though I feel like I need more practice to do it well. The CKAN training, I was pretty satisfied with the outcome, by the end of the week, the folks from e-Gov Agency went in and setup a server with CKAN!
Note to self: Write these posts immediately after the trip before I forget 🙂
I’ve spent the last month in Delhi, mostly having fun and spending time with friends. Remote working does have the advantage that I can work from anywhere as long as there’s power a…
I’ve spent the last month in Delhi, mostly having fun and spending time with friends. Remote working does have the advantage that I can work from anywhere as long as there’s power and an Internet connection. I’m not a very touristy person, but here’s a few places I visited out of peer pressure and curiosity.
If you have a Bengali friend in Delhi, the chances are quite high that you have been dragged there (er, convinced to visit). In total, I went there 3 times during my stay and each time, I found the food spectacular. More amusing is the feeling that I’m not in Delhi anymore. I hear Bengali everywhere. My friend feels right at home and talks to the shopkeepers in Bengali. The shopkeepers even talk to me in Bengali (I just end up keep a blank face)!
The streets are filled with books. It felt like Blossoms, but on the street with no air conditioning. Overall, I found less fiction and a lot more study guides and the like. There are strategically placed ATMs all around the street, so in case you over-purchase, you can always withdraw more money. The only enemy is the heat. By the time we finished shopping, I was thoroughly exhausted and thirsty. We ate at the restaurant that claims to have invented butter chicken (Not all that much spectacular).
I couldn’t go back home without meeting Prateek and Souvik of Miranj. We decided to go to Old Delhi on a food walk, and luckily we were all non-vegetarians. So, one Friday evening, we took the (very crowded) Yellow line to Chawri Bazar. I took a while to process the streets after getting out of the metro. Crowded streets, cycle rickshaws, and very narrow roads were the norm. To add to the “fun”, there were a bunch of bikes, honking loudly.
There were 6 of us and the plan was to visit 4 or 5 places, ordering food for one person at each place. We started with a place with pretty great buffalo meat. It was spicy and very juicy. We were headed to a place with Kheer next, but they’d run out! At the next stop, we ordered a full fried chicken. Then, it was a mutton curry. The last stop had beef fried rice (…heaven!).
After the main course, we had to have dessert. Souvik and Prateek knew a Kulfi place with a wide variety of flavors. I don’t remember all of them, but to give an idea: Jamun, Paan, and Anaar. I can’t remember the other flavors, but we were fighting for a few of them 🙂
Something I noticed while we were there was the gender ratio. There were very few women walking around in the streets. Probably less than 25 during the entire trip. And the streets were extremely crowded.
I learned recently that the Assamese New Year’s is around the same time as the Malayalam New Year and Bengali New Year. On the Sunday after the New Year, we went to an event organized by the Assam Association. I had a bit of a flashback of growing up in the middle east. There was no sitting room once the program started and everyone was enjoying being with people who spoke their language.
Before the event started, we had “lunch” (at 5 pm :P). It wasn’t Assamese food, but more of a generic North Eastern meal. There was pork involved (need I say more?). After we were sufficiently fed, we walked around to discover a Nirbhaya Multiple Expressions exhibition next door. We got back just in time for the cultural programs to start. As usual, it started off a bit boring and then got better. The most fun was a dance by the little kids. They looked very adorable dancing in saris.
Overall, I seem to have gotten a wide range of experiences in this trip. There’s more to do and see, but then I’m incredibly lazy to step out 🙂
On January 24, I got an email from the Speakers Team at FOSSMeet asking me if I would be able to propose a talk. Fast forward to Feburary 13th, I was on…
On January 24, I got an email from the Speakers Team at FOSSMeet asking me if I would be able to propose a talk. Fast forward to February 13th, I was on a bus heading to Kozhikode. It’s been quite a while since I’ve talked a conference and this would be the first I’d talk about open data. Despite being a Malayali, I’d actually not met a lot of members of the FOSS community from Kerala. As usual, I enjoyed meeting and talking to people about their work and what they do (yes, I’m still an introvert :D).
On the first day, I attended Praveen’s talk (fine, not talk, a discussion) about privacy. Rather fierce arguments broke about privacy, specifically whether the government should invade it to save lives. I’m fairly certain it got a lot of people thinking about privacy. It’s hard to think about things like privacy unless you can contextualize it for yourself and that’s exactly what happened.
After lunch, I sat in the session about Anoop’s workshop about contributing to Open Source. It was meant to give people an idea of the tools you should know. I only sat in it for an hour or so and they were learning git at that time. A while later, I stepped out, primarily because I was starting to get sleepy.
I got back to the main auditorium, just in time to learn that a student passed away on the campus, in the grounds we could see from the auditorium. A wall fell down and he was stuck under it. All of attendees were asked to be in one of the lecture halls while the organizers talked to the faculty and figure out what next. The organizers decided to cancel all the entertainment activities that were planned and the hack night. The remaining sessions were held as an informal discussion rather than actual talks. Later that night, the events of next day were also canceled.
My talk had a few people and we had good conversation about open data and thanks to Nirbheek, we had people glance at The Ballot. I couldn’t give the talk I planned, but I’m grateful for the discussions we had. Later that day, the students were leading a protest in front of the director’s house and the rest of the event was formally canceled.
FOSSMeet seems to be a wonderful place to get more students aware of free and open source and kickstarting contributions. The organizers had done a good job, but were just unlucky with the turn of events. Now that I’ve attended FOSSMeet once, I’m planning on attending the next editions for sure.