I was in NIT Durgapur, West Bengal (my home away from home until a year and a few months back) to attend an event celebrating 10 years of DGPLUG. This was held in the college campus from 29th August to 2nd September. Not considering the fact that being back in West Bengal for that short interval was a beautiful experience for me, I have returned back to Pune with a bag full of memories from the event, which I believe was an amazing success. The goal of the event was to celebrate a decade of the DGPLUG community while holding talks and workshops to promote contributions to Free and Open Source software from the region. All thanks to Red Hat and the TEQIP cell NIT Durgapur for making this possible by providing the necessary funds for travel and accommodation. I’ll try and provide a day-by-day account of the event as I remember:
Day 0: We (me, sayan, chandankumar, praveenkumar, rtnpro and pjp) reached Durgapur around 5:40 pm and were settled in the hotel in an hour. We took some rest, while waiting for Kushal to arrive after which we had a nice dinner at a local restaurant, called Layeks. We discussed our plans for the next day during and after the dinner. All we could do after a day of journey and a fulfilling dinner was to sleep off. We needed to start early next day.
Day 1: After the initial formalities, the event started off with Kushal initiating the talk on the history of DGPLUG. I’m pretty sure the audience really loved that talk. Next there was some story-telling by the DGPLUG members where they spoke of how they were introduced to FOSS contributions, the DGPLUG community and how DGPLUG played an important role in each of our lives.
The audience was introduced to the DGPLUG summer training program that is organised each year following which the new members of DGPLUG were called in on stage to introduce themselves and speak on how the DGPLUG summer training helped.
After this Kushal demoed IRC live on the big screen which provided the audience with enough entertainment to get them charged up for the technical talk by Prasad J. Pandit (P J P) on iptables. His talk touched on concepts of networking and invited a lot of questions from the audience.
P J P starting his talk on iptables
The day ended with pjp’s talk and we headed off to our hotels to freshen up for a team dinner.
Day 2: This day started with a well-promoted Python workshop, which was evident from the overwhelming participation. The D. M. Sen Auditorium Hall was packed with no seats left.
Fully packed auditorium for the Python workshop
The participants took off to Python really well, and there were comparatively a lot few mistakes from them even though the workshop pace was not too slow. During the course of the workshop, the students were introduced to Vi/Vim and almost all of them used this for editing purposes. We realised that the workshop was a real success when we found the auditorium hall filled to capacity even after an 1-hour break for lunch.
Day 3: Workshops were help on web development using Flask and testing in Python. I did not have much to contribute to the workshop on Flask and instead gave some time to my personal agenda which was giving time to the KF5 porting work for KStars that I had been postponding for long.
Day 4: This was the last day of the event for me. The day started with Kushal Das giving a short talk on the importance of providing documentation for the code we write. This provided the necessary build up to the workshop introducing the participants to reStructuredText format or RST. By lunch time, the participants had a grasp of the RST format. After lunch, Kushal started off with his workshop on documenting Python using Sphinx.
Over these past 4 days, I interacted with 2 guys, Sourav Moitra and Raunak Pillai, both of whom showed a lot of interest in getting started with contributing to KDE. Sourav Moitra was interested in Astronomy and KStars interested him. He got KDE installed on his Fedora 20 system and I helped him build and install KStars from source. He also setup KDevelop with KStars and learned how to to use KDevelop as an IDE for development purposes. He went through the source and asked question to clear off doubts.
The event managed to retain a very healthy crowd each day and I consider that an important parameter to measure the success level for an event. On top of that we received feedback from the participants which made it clear that they wanted more such events being organised in NIT Durgapur and surrounding locations.
P.S. : Akademy 2014 is about to start off and I feel so sad not being able to attend it. Anyway, wishing Akademy 2014 all the best and hope all the attendees have an awesome time!