FOSS.IN 2008 Report (Part I)

FOSS.IN was an event I usually attended, last year I co-presented and this year presented and held a workshop at. I've been meaning to display promotional content on my blog

But... I could not :(

Anyway, the story is not over, even though foss.in for 2008 is. The promos show clearly what the organizers had in mind. I must admit that the organizers make me nervous with the schedule, with selected talks being announced about three weeks before the final event, when I was on vacation. The schedule and slides can be found here. I presented on control groups and organized a workout for libcgroup. Both were well received with significant queries at the end of the talk and good workout participation. We got several patches posted during the workout and after. The workout plan and updates are here.

One of the things we did well this year, was the kernel hacker day at foss.in and followed it up with a successful workout. We had a good number of people come and talk to us about the kernel, their intention to contribute and the issues they face. We admittedly had a plan 9 fan, apart from Christoph Hellwig. There were lightening talks and I spoke about my ideas on building a threaded RB tree for Linux.

Kernel Hacker Gathering (Photo by James Morris as seen on flickr)

There are some fun photos, that several people took. Kushal from Fedora took some very nice ones. He was kind enough to photograph all women and leave me out. Needless to say Kushal, you owe me a T-shirt and I want it now! James Morris, did a good job of taking photographs as well.

(Photo by James Morris as seen on flickr)

(Photo by James Morris as seen on flickr)

One thing that did catch my attention was my T-Shirt with my name on it. I love the T-Shirt and hope it stops choking me, when I wear it, someday :)

Speaker T-Shirts (Thanks, well done guys!!)

I was caught working, I could show the code if needed!

You can find James' photo set here.

Lets step back, the event began with a video from team FOSS.IN

Atul has always been a good speaker, he began by explaining the motivation for the change this year and ate an Apple on the stage, claiming that it was only low hanging fruit in the conference and he ate it :) Unfortunately for Atul, we provided other low hanging fruits to developers and allowed people to contribute, even if the contribution was trivial. In the longer run, as foss.in proceeds year and year, I think we'll find the low hanging fruits disappear as the developers mature and our contributions mature.

I'll update on the keynotes, the other speakers and more interesting stuff in part II, stay tuned.