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.

10 Ways of contributing to GNOME

Extremely good guide for people who are looking for a niche to contributing to GNOME or FOSS in general. It wasn't a long time back when I also belonged to the group of FOSS enthusiasts who wanted to get into FOSS development but didn't know how. Now you have a great article, to give you a start. You should read the full article as I am just pasting the 10 points :

1. GNOME Accessibility Team
2. GNOME Bugsquad Team
3. GnomeLove Project
4. GNOME Documentation Project
5. GNOME Translation Project
6. GNOME Usability Project
7. GNOME Webhackers Team
8. GNOME System Administration Team
9. GNOME Art Team
10. Friends of GNOME

Google Custom Search Engine

I made a few modifications to the layout of the blog, as can be seen. Added a newsreel with FOSS and GSoC related news and decided to add Google Ads hoping that I might make some profit ;)
The modification which I would like to mention here is the Google custom search engine box which is seen on the top of the right column. I designed that custom search engine last night to give better FOSS, GSoC and internship related searches. For the few keywords I checked, it gave better results than the normal Google search.
As the CSE is still extremely new, it needs a lot of improvement. I am planning to add sitemaps, include related sites and further refinements to make the search better. Volunteers are welcome, you can do that by clicking here or by visiting the homepage of the CSE.
So with the hope of getting a few volunteers to improve this search engine and with the promise of refining the results, I urge you all to use it and tell me if it makes your life any easy. Happy searching :-)