FOSS+GSoC Meetup at Allahabad, May 11th 2009

Front: Ishan Chattopadhyaya, Kalpana Roy, Shalin Mangar (AOL), B.S. Sanjeev (Faculty, IIITA), Kapil Mishra Back: Shashwat Anand, Anshul Kesarwani, Rajeev Kumar, Aman Aggarwal

As decided through the poll embedded on the blog earlier, we had the first FOSS+GSoC meetup in Allahabad today. The meetup comprised of 3 GSoCers selected for this year (kr0y, l0nwlf & Ishan) alongwith FOSS enthusiasts (Anshul, Kapil, Aman, Rajeev) and our celebrities Shalin Mangar (AOL S/W Engineer and Apache Solr committer) and Dr. B.S. Sanjeev (Faculty, IIIT Allahabad).
The meetup started with formal introductions and stating the favorite Linux distro (Fedora users in majority) followed by a round of coffee. Then we moved onto discussion on FOSS and latest technologies in open source. Shalin and BSS did most of the talking but we gained a lot of information about new open source projects and languages including (but not limited to) Solr, Lucene, Hadoop, Scala, Erlang, Mahout and Onyomo. Then l0nwlf, Ishan and I explained about our GSoC projects and the group had a discussion on each. How-to-start-contributing-into-FOSS (and-eventually-get-into-GSoC) formed the next round of discussions. Ishan, who is kinda a child prodigy for starting the same at the age of 15, shared his experiences. Shalin added on the same by suggesting some new technologies which are really exciting and need contribution. Bug posting, documentation, installing the software from scratch and source code understanding emerged as a few points through which newbies can easily get into open source contribution and development.
After another round of coffee, with l0nwlf having 3&1/2 cups (how much can this guy eat drink?), we moved onto query solving session and our future plans. Apart from completing our GSoC projects, l0nwlf and Ishan will be doing an internship at NTRO and AOL respectively while I will be joining my job at Adobe in the summers. Anshul is currently working on the site Allahabad 360 and showed interest in using Onyomo as a local search engine; Aman & Rajeev expressed their desire to attend an NVIDIA CUDA workshop in IIT Chennai later in the year while Kapil was seen to be pretty impressed by FOSS and promised to start contribution to open source, starting in the summers itself. BSS favored introducing bug fixing in some simple FOSS projects at B.Tech. level for the interested students (yay!) and Shalin stated that contribution to already existing open source softwares/solutions can be much better than being a regular participant of TopCoder/ACM/SPOJ etc. in terms of fetching a job. Quoting him, "A lot of people can solve problems fast and move on to the next one quickly. Very few have the patience and the will to go through the F/OSS experience. The good thing about both is that it shows the person is interested enough in this field to do it for free."
Turned out to be a great discussion which was extremely knowledgeable and fruitful for all of us. Was great to meet so many enthusiasts and know more about their experiences and views about FOSS. Shalin paid the bills which brought an additional bunch of smiles on our already glistening faces ;) FOSS FTW!!!

P.S. : Additional pics can be seen at Ishan's Picasa album. /me seems to be frowning everywhere.