MY EXPERIENCE AT FUDCon 2015

A few days ago I attended FUDCon which was held in MIT college, Pune, India from 26–28 June, 2015. I had an amazing experience while I got introduced to the open source world.I also met a lot of people from the fedora community. This was the first conference I ever attended. And the best part, it was free for everyone to attend(everybody loves to roll over free things :P :D ).

I got to know about this conference when Kushal Das came down to our college to talk about fedora and open source. Everything sounded so much fun that I decided to attend the conference. I was unable to attend Day 1 of the conference because of college timings but made sure to be there at Day 2 and Day 3. So, I am going to share my experience for the other two days at the conference.

Day 1:

Absent at FUDCon, attending classes in college :\

Day 2:

I along with a friend of mine walked to the venue and reached by around 12:30. There was a fedora booth set up in front of the auditorium from where we picked some cool fedora swags(like fedora stickers and badges). Then we went off to the auditorium and there was a talk going on “Community architecture-a different perspective” by Sankarshan. I was not able to understand much but could here some familiar words like community, open source though I am still not sure what do they actually mean. After the talk got over, we met Kushal and he told us what all talks we should attend being newbies. He also introduced us to Ryan Lerch who works for the fedora design team.We spoke to him for a while and he told us about his design workshop which was there the next day.There was also a group photo session with all the fedora people. Later we attended two more talks on “Selling Open Source” by Izhar Firdans and “Running project Atomic and Docker on Fedora” by Aditya Patawari and Lalatendu Mohanty. The day was good and we returned to our hostel with an enthusiasm to come back the next day as well.

Day 3:

We made sure that we reached well on time to attend Ryan’s workshop at 10:00 in the morning and learn something. First, there was the inkscape workshop by Sirko Kenter. Inkscape is a vector graphics editor and the aim was to create a needle and button using the software. The workshop was fun although my button was not at all similar to what Sirko made.:P Next in line was the Blender workshop by Ryan Lerch. Blender is an open source 3D graphics tool used for creating animated films, 3D applications, video games etc.We ended up making a block of a jelly-like substance that falls on the floor. Both the workshops were good and we enjoyed a lot. After lunch, we went to the auditorium where we talked to Kushal for sometime and he told us something about web of trust. Later he introduced us to Jared Smith who was the Fedora Project Leader earlier. He also helped my friend to dual boot her system as she wanted both windows and fedora in her system.So with this the day ended and it was truly an amazing experience.Now i hope to start contributing to fedora :)

Overall it was awesome!! Looking forward to the next fedora event:)