My experience at Linux App Summit 2019
Two weeks back, I visited the city of Barcelona with a friend, Amit for the much-awaited Linux App Summit. It was organized by GNOME Foundation and KDE Community together. I was excited to be on the organizing team for the summit. It was my first experience being on the organizers’ side and not attendees' side, for such a large-scale event, and it was a really great experience.
We landed in Barcelona, it was quite cold. Yet another time, I had wrongly estimated the temperature of a foreign place. The place where we stayed was pretty warm though. Just after keeping our luggage, we went out for breakfast. Luckily, we found an Indian restaurant very close by, that served us really delicious Shaahi Paneer :P
The evening was reserved for a pre-registration event for everyone to get to know each other. It was a fun event, I met people like Nuritzi, Sri, Aleix, Adriaan, Ismael, Jorge, Kristi, Pilar and many more, with whom I had been in constant touch over Telegram regarding the conference preparations. After a great evening, we, the ones handling Marketing and PR activities, sat down and worked on Tweets.
We knew tomorrow’s gonna be interesting.
The next day was the very first day of the conference. We reached the venue earlier and everyone just voluntarily assigned themselves some work and started preparing for the conference. I was going to be the anchor, and the stage handling person. Nuritzi quickly gave me some tips on how to do everything.
Everyone was full of a spirit of Open-Source, great speakers stepped up the stage, some interesting questions were asked, the venue was beautiful, and people were all very warm. It was a beautiful day.
Next day, the conference was great as usual. I interviewed some of the speakers, about their experience. There was this question I asked almost everyone: “What’s the first word that comes to your mind when I say Open Source?” Well, undoubtedly, most of the answers were ‘Community’ and ‘Freedom’. It was an interesting bit of the day.
We had a cool city tour in Barcelona in the evening, hosted by the summit.
It was “cool” literally too :P
We had a look at some really interesting architecture of Barcelona. But honestly, nothing caught my eye more than “Official Merchandise store of FC Barcelona”.
The next day, I and Amit gave a lightning talk. Since I was involved in mic-coordinating and Amit, in camera handling, we couldn’t get much time to prepare. But it was anyway a lightning talk, that had to be lightning fast.
The next day was the hard one, as we had to say bye to many people since it was the last day of the conference. I just can’t stress more on how much I love and cherish this beautiful experience I had at LAS.
It was a fun-filled atmosphere all around. There were all techies, but the laughter and smiles in the room were enough to tell that nobody was in their “geek mode”.
The next day, we had a quick BoF session in the morning. It was about what went well at the summit and ideas on how we can improve it next year. Everyone wrote their points on sticky notes and pasted on the whiteboard and then an interesting discussion followed where we all discussed next year's plans in detail.
Later that day, we went out for a city tour again. Nuritzi and Sri had looked up some places to visit. I, Amit, Pilar, and Shola were eager to join them! We had lots of fun at the Montjuic Castle, in the cable car, at the cafe, in Barcelona all together. I will let the pictures tell the rest of the story!
All in all, it was a beezer time indeed. Thanks to everyone involved, for making it such an amazing experience.
Looking forward to seeing you all next year at LAS 2020 :)
Thanks for reading, take care.
