FUDCon Phnom Phen , Cambodia

This post is going to be about FUDCon APAC 2016 where I presented on Fedora QA and Web VR . My journey started from Bangalore , IN via Thailand and ending at Phenom Phen Cambodia. Although it was a long journey but it was fun !

Let me start from the point which were of vital significance , I met Kushal , Anwesha , Sayan and Parag during my layover in Thailand .  Just after the touchdown , I remember myself running for Visa on Arrival and Custom clearance . Yekleang Dy greeted us and it was awesome .


Focusing back on the event , Day 1 started with Brian talking about Fedora State of the Union talk from Brian Exelbierd, Fedora Community Action and Impact Lead.

       

Then all the parallel session started . The very first session I attended was Kanika's - Programming with Rust , which one a very interactive session with a bunch of college students .

                          

Followed by lunch where Srijan , me and Parag had a long discussion and planned ourselves for the next talk. I always wanted to understand packaging and translation stuffs , so Parag helped a lot . Also, Srijan and me discussed about wikitolearn and I found it very interesting .

Parag Nemade is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat. He is an active contributor to Fedora project, sponsor for packager group, proven packager, helps in improving Fedora packaging and testing Fedora updates. Parag introduced us to Globalization. It is a collaborative work done by internationalizing, localizing your software. He told us how important it is to globalize the code you write. Then he told what Localization is and how to add internationalization in code by showing some code examples. It was a great talk!


 

The following talk was by Alex Eng on Zanata, a translation platform. One of the best and interesting talk for the day. Alex presented a round up of the new features that will be available in the next release of the translation tool.




 

The next talk was on Web Virtual Reality by Sumantro Mukherjee. The highlight of the talk was a-frame. A-frame is a web framework for building virtual reality experiences and works on almost all devices. With just few lines of code, you can turn a video into 360 degree Virtual Reality. Amazing, isn’t it?

The last talk of the day was by Anwesha Das on A walk on licenses in Fedora ecosystem. She gave an overview of all the open source licenses, why it is important to use a license and what are the best practices of using a license. The take from the talk was not to use personalized licenses and even if you use it, not to name it like Buy me a beer or something similar. Overall, it was great to learn about Licenses.
Best part of this talk was "never try to invent your own licenses"

Day 2 : FUDCon APAC, Norton University, Phnom Penh
Day 2 started with heavy rains at Cambodia. Thanks to Sirko for providing raincoats! It was another day of interesting talks and I had my talk at 3pm.
The first talk I went to was by Noriko Mizumoto on How can you help us get Fedora to the world?. Noriko hails from Japan and is a Community Relations Specialist and Program Manager, Red Hat Asia Pacific. Noriko focused on the importance of localization. Localization of a software is very important, since non-native English speakers are much more when compared to native English speakers.She introduced how Fedora has been localized into over 80 languages. A great talk, indeed.

Following was the talk on Exploring Fedora Infrastructure by Sayan Chowdhary. Sayan Chowdhary is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, Pune and has been a Python developer contributing to Fedora. Sayan talked about Fedora web projects and how can one contribute to them.

Next was the talk by Kushal Das on Testing Fedora Atomic in an automated way. I don’t need to introduce him (:P). He talked about testing fedora atomic project in an automated way by using Python and Go script made by him. It went over my head mostly, since I never contributed to Fedora.

Anyway, it is always amazing to listen him speaking. The way he explains a scenario, is absolutely stunning.

After the better lunch, next talk I attended was on Fedora QA by Sumantro Mukherjee. Sumantro introduced us to Fedora Quality Assurance, the workflow and how to test a package. Great talk, indeed.

Now, it was time for Srijan's talk on WikiToLearn : Bringing Academia to the Internet Era : A revolution in Knowledge Sharing. He  introduced WikiToLearn to the attendees, how to contribute and gave them a hand-on session on “How to make a personalized book”. I briefed on how WikiToLearn is being adapted at European Universities and making it easier for students and professors for collaborative learning. I spoke on who/how can contribute being a student, teacher, translator or hacker, how the project is having powerful impact not only in Europe but also in the world with many universities involved and also organizations like KDE, Wikimedia Foundation and the CERN, About the power of collaboration and its impact in academia with the help of WikiToLearn and also how students and professors are using it in their universities as a tool to make learning much more effective in a collaborative way. Slides for the talk can be found here.

The last talk was on Contributing to Mediawiki by Abhinand N. Abhinand is a Google Summer of Code’16 select for Mediawiki. He actively contributes to Mediawiki. He introduced attendees to Mediawiki and how can one contribute to Mediawiki by code. He briefed about Gerrit and the workflow of patch submission. It was a great talk, too.

We had a great party after the talks at Fudpub with Barcamp organizers. Free beer, yaay (:D).

This was the first time, I attended Fedora event and it was amazing to meet and interact with developers around the world including Gerard Braad, Siddesh Poyarekar, Mohan Prakash, Jens Peterson, Nisha Poyarekar, Estu Fardani, Robert Mayr, Ryan Lerch and Tommy He. Kudos to the local organizers and KDE for sponsoring my trip. Overall, it was an amazing experience which I’m going to cherish for long.