Dev Cluster says, “Hello 2020”
(Cut me some slack. It’s been years since I’ve put the proverbial pen to paper.)
As the title says, I will be chronicling our first event in 2020, a Blender Workshop by our very own, Rudraksh Kanekar. (I spoke, too, but this is about the event, not me.) This was held in association with ‘Saavyas’, NIT Goa’s annual techno-cultural fest, on 18 January 2020.
Ashwin Naik, our Community Representative for NITG, has long been an active member of our community. So when Pranav Naik (that’s a lot of Naiks, eh?), Ashwin’s classmate and in-charge of Saavyas learned about us, he approached Dev Cluster to organise a pre-event for them. After all, who better to approach for their inaugural pre-event?
Rudraksh (or Drax, as we call him), has long loved all things FOSS: right from kick-starting my dream of having a FOSS Club at GEC, to organising a national-level FOSS event in Goa (DebUtsav Goa 2019, look it up!), Drax has been a part of it all. It’s only natural to know that he uses FOSS for all his work designing our posters and his other design-related pastimes. Since our “poster boy” was keen on spreading his knowledge of Blender, we chose him to take over this time.
Pranav from the Saavyas team was also kind enough to invite me to speak, so I decided to talk about my experience with communities to keep it light: Drax’s Blender session would be the main show.
Come D-Day, a Saturday. I was supposed to begin the event with my session starting at 10 a.m. sharp. Unfortunately, I did not make it in time (how did I ever travel 40 kilometres and reach college at 9 a.m. is beyond me). As such, I reached at 10:25 (not that late, right?) and somehow managed to find the classroom to find Drax already talking about the different FOSS tools for design. Way to steal my thunder, man.
Jokes apart, I then spoke about my journey with communities and Dev Cluster and explained what we do. While the event was open to all, one doesn’t usually see people from outside the host college in the audience. I was thus pleasantly surprised to see some students from Don Bosco College of Engineering, Fatorda, (who didn’t even live in Ponda but still made it on time before me) and Bijon Shah, a senior member of Goa’s Free Software Users Group.
After I wrapped up, Drax took over and began teaching them Blender with a most unusual example for a model — sushi! While design is not my cup of tea, Drax did a great job of explaining. Unfortunately, I couldn’t wait till the end, since I had double-booked myself on that day, so Pranav and Ashwin bid me a warm adieu with a bouquet of flowers (ironically not my first time). All in all, an event well done, as confirmed by the feedback we received later to start our own design community!
