My experience in FOSSASIA summit’19
After getting motivated by other fellow FOSSASIA developers, I am writing my experience in Codeheat and attending the FOSSASIA summit. This march I traveled to Singapore for the FOSSASIA summit as Codeheat finalist which gave me a travel allowance of 100 SGD and free tickets to all the events at the summit. This was my first time traveling to a foreign country for a tech summit.Let’s start..
FOSSASIA ???
FOSSASIA is a non-profit open-source organization founded in 2009 centered in Asia. They host an annual meet up attracting developers from all over the world. They participate in outreach programs such as Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in and also organize a similar program CodeHeat to promote the development of various projects hosted by FOSSASIA.
This year’s summit was held in Lifelong Learning Institute in Singapore. This event was for 4 days. There were about 200+ topics and tracks, workshops, exhibitions by a large number of exhibitors from the tech industry. A few examples of the tracks were Cloud Containers, Personal Voice Assistants, Blockchain, Open Data, Database and many more. There was also a list of featured speakers like Shanker V Selvadurai , Duane O’Brien , Mitch Altman, and many more. They were talks, workshops and exhibitions by many FOSS organizations and companies like Facebook, Microsoft, IBM etc;
Talks
There were a couple of great talks we got caught during the summit. One was from Duane O’Brien which gave a brief overview of sustaining FOSS projects and also I attended some talks given by developers from various Open-Source Organizations. All in all, I got to know about various technologies and it was a great learning experience.
Workshops
We attended the Microsoft Workshop and got a free giveaway. The workshop was on “Deployment of a multi-container application on Kubernetes”. It was a hands-on workshop and we were given a free Azure subscription and Azure Cloud Shell during the workshop and you can access the contents of the workshop here AKS Workshop. We also attended the IBM workshop and got a free giveaway. The workshop was on “Bringing Trust and Transparency in AI”.
Exhibitions
They were exhibitions by many FOSS organizations and companies on all days of the summit. It was the main attraction point for me, because of the interaction between developers who were sharing their projects and vision of their companies there. Also, the free goodies, stickers, and swags were a bonus and I filled a whole a bag of goodies, which was also a goody from Indeed. As part of the FOSSASIA community, I volunteered at FOSSASIA and Meilix (My project during Codeheat) booths along with my mentor. It was a great experience and we got great responses from the fellow participants and exhibitors.
Hackathon and Codeheat Award Ceremony
FOSSASIA in collaboration with UNESCO organized a hackathon where the main motive was to build awesome apps, games, and assistants improving people’s. We were fortunate to get the runner-up prize in the usage of Cloud Services by IBM. We won 24000 USD cloud credits and won 150 SGD cash price. Thanks to Zack YEO for giving us free credits to the IBM cloud. On the last day of the summit, I got a medal and the cash prize for finishing as a finalist in the Codeheat Open-Source hackathon during the Codeheat award ceremony.
Sightseeing
Singapore is a beautiful place. Every day after the summit, we went for sightseeing across the city and the social events that were organized by FOSSASIA. We went to Mariana Bay Sands, Super Grove Trees, Gardens by the Bay, Botanical Garden, Sentosa Island, National Orchid Garden, Singapore Flyer, Merlion Statue. We mostly traveled through MRT’s(public transport) and sometimes through Cab(Grab).
The greatest advantage for me attending the summit was talking and sharing ideas with senior developers in FOSSASIA and other companies. It was a one of the best experiences for me where I got to learn a lot. The next Codeheat will start in September. And feel free to reach out to me if you need any help. I will also write a blog on my Codeheat journey.
