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Mozilla Summit 2013 – Connections
There already have been several excellent blog posts about the Summit. I want to talk about the biggest opportunity that the Summit provided – in-person connections. I’ve been involved with Mozilla since 2011 and this is the third Mozilla event I’ve attended. Compared to the previous events, Mozilla Summit 2013 was a sensory overload, in a pleasant way of course.

On Wednesday, I met pleia2 at Union Square. We walked around and had dinner at her favorite burger place, which had a beautiful view of the Union Square. The next day, I was at the Mozilla Space in San Francisco. I spent most of the day working on HTML parsing for “Who Owns What”. It turned out that Rob was headed to Santa Clara via Caltrain and stopped by the office to say hi. I love trains, and I joined Rob. We had a great conversation going all the way until the hotel.

At the hotel, I was excited to say hi to Ben, we’ve known each other from Ubuntu and Mozilla communities. I accidentally got into the wrong elevator and I met Wes on it. That evening, a hilarious confusion happened, which is now a running joke among those who know Ashish and me. Jen and a few others walked up to Ashish and asked if he was Nigel. When I finally did meet Jen, Sole, and jbuck; sole amended my nametag to say “The real nigelb”. I believe Ashish later had “Nigel Babu*” written on one side of name tag, with the * expanded below to “*Not”. That evening, I met Jessica Ledbetter and James Tantum, who I know primarily from the Ubuntu community, for dinner at a nice Greek restaurant.

Over the course of the Summit, I met glob, bhearsum, dolske, edmorely, Dino, Gen, sid0, peterbe, Kaitlin, Kate, Hilary, Ludovic, and lots of Mozillians from the Asian and especially Indian community who were familiar from the Mozcamps. On Friday evening, after the Firefox OS dinner, I met morgamic for the first time! It was definitely an exciting moment for me. Later, philikon was talking to morgamic and he looked familiar. I asked him his IRC nick name and I had an Aha! moment. I’m grateful to have met all the folks from Mozilla Webdev who were in Santa Clara – Ben, Erik Rose, Luke, David Walsh, Jen, Sole, Owen, James, Craig, Peter, Lars, Rob, zalun, and others who I don’t even remember names to make a proper list. After the Summit, I went to the Pinterest office to meet Dave Dash. He was my mentor when I first started contributing to Mozilla and again, it was great to meet him in person. As I think back to the summit, all the people I’ve met are my most treasured memory.
Note: If I haven’t mentioned your name, it’s because I’ve forgotten it. These few weeks have been a bit stressful and it’s been more then 2 months since the Summit.
2013-12-04
NaNoWriMo Failure
At some point last month, I was a bit excited about writing a novel for NaNoWriMo. However, my health from the start of this month hasn’t been great, sadly. On the one hand, I love the idea of writing, it definitely improves my mood in general. I was pretty sure I’d suck at it, but I wanted to give it a try. On the other hand, at the start of the month, I’d just gotten out of the hospital. I was just getting back to normal energy levels when I got in the hospital again. It’s the 16th today, and I’ve written 10 words. At this point, I’ll admit failure.
I’m only admitting failure for the goal of writing 50K in November. I will still try to write a 50K novel. Or write 50K words of blog posts in a month inspired by Katie.
2013-11-16
Hello Again, Hospital
I seem to be having a not-so-good time health-wise. First, I decided to celebrate getting paid by ordering a pizza last month. My body doesn’t seem to like unhealthy food, because I was throwing up the next morning. I tried to drink water and have an anti-vomit tablet, but that didn’t help. When I got to the point where I couldn’t keep down water, I had my friends take me to the hospital. The doctor in the Casuality gave me an injection and started me on IV fluids. I think I slept for some time and when I woke up, I threw up again. At this point, the doctor asked me if I wanted to be admitted overnight and I agreed it was a good idea.
By morning, I finally stopped throwing up. The doctor wanted to keep me for a few days because my creatinine levels were a little high and kept increasing. At that moment, to be honest, I didn’t understand the seriousness of what was happening. When I asked him if he’d let me go that evening, he said my kidneys weren’t functioning well and until that became normal, he wouldn’t send me home. I ended up staying from Wednesday evening until Monday evening, getting lots of IV fluids and drinking lots of water. The final diagnosis was that I was extremely dehydrated and this affected my kidney function briefly. When I was discharged, my doctor said I was very lucky to avoid dialysis. That’s when I understood the seriousness of what happened.
The next day, I flew to Kerala to spend some time with parents so I didn’t have to cook for a few days and my parents would have some relief on seeing me. That’s when the second incident happened – I had a seizure, for the first time that I know of. I don’t remember much of Wednesday except turning off the alarm. When they got me to the hospital, they gave me enough injections that I was out until evening. I woke up around 7:30 pm in the Neurology and Stroke ICU. I had brief memories of being near the MRI machine, my aunt standing at the edge of my bed, and another aunt telling me something. I didn’t even realize I was in the ICU until the patient in the bed next to me told me.
Later, my dad came and talked to me. That’s when I understood what happened. I was under observation for one night and I was, to be honest, extremely bored. The nurses in the ICU were friendly, but most patients were sedated so I could just look around and watch them work. I stayed in the hospital from Wednesday until Saturday this time. After all the tests, the neurologist advised me to take more rest and stress less, and I was otherwise okay. Sigh. If you don’t see me around like you used to, now you know why 🙂
2013-11-13
A year at OKF!
I cannot believe how quickly time has passed! Two trips to Cambridge for the summit, 100+ commits on CKAN and CKAN extensions, contributions to PyBossa, OpenSpending and satellite sites, and innumerable GIFs later – I’ve finished a year at the Open Knowledge Foundation!
It doesn’t seem like time has passed at all. I remember the first call I had with Rufus and making the Salary Converter. Among all the interviews I’ve had, interviewing at OKF is definitely among the top 3.
In the last year, I’ve learned a lot about working remotely and I’m now in love with being a remotee. Managing time better is also something I’ve become far better at than I used to. I’ve discovered that my best time for productive coding is 6 am to 12 pm. Any day that I start at 6 am is bound to be a very productive one; starting later makes me struggle to be productive.
The two trips to Cambridge have been a lot of fun – meeting my colleagues and planning for the 6 months ahead. Plus, it’s the one time I get to actually grab a drink with my team!
On the programming side, the biggest learning has been handling testing better. Thanks to my team, I’ve learned to write new tests and fix the ones I break, though I occasionally run into “how did these tests ever pass” kind of tests though, leading to a fun day of debugging. I’ve also volunteered to own projects in our team that’s leaning towards operations. This has given me a chance to work with Ansible and refresh my packaging experience.
Ever since I’ve started working as a programmer, OKF is the first time I’ve stayed on for a year, and I have to give full credit to my amazing colleagues who’ve made waking up to work fun!
2013-10-19
US Visa Acquired!
I’ve been a little tensed about my upcoming travel to Santa Clara for the Mozilla Summit in October, because the last time I applied for a US visa, my application was denied. Today, my visa application was granted! I’ll be in Santa Clara in October and I hope to meet my mozillian friends as well other friends who live in SF (looks in the direction of pleia2).
Yesterday night, I spent about 20 minutes indexing all my documents neatly with Post-Its and sorting them by the order they might be asked. The visa officer didn’t ask to see any documents. He asked me about my travel, why I was traveling, who was paying for it, why Mozilla was paying for it, about my current job and salary, and if I’ve traveled out of the country before. At the end of it, he said, “We’re done. Have a good trip.” It took me a while to get past the shock, but yay! It’s going to be great fun and I look forward to hanging out with everyone 🙂
2013-09-17