Taking home from FUDCon Pune

It was phenomenal what I took back home from FUDCon Pune. Lots of memories, experiences, knowledge, and also a nice swag kit and Fedora 22 DVDs.
It was my first event of the kind and given the experience of previous ones of other kinds that I had attended in the past, there were some apprehensions in my mind. Fedora had sponsored my trip and that was really a big thing for me as I had never met anyone from the organisers in person earlier.
I reached the MIT campus early at 7:30 in the morning and there were people already present there setting up the booths and making arrangements.
The first keynote was amazing. Dennis Gilmore highlighted what's new in Fedora 22. It was attended by a huge audience, about 200. Many questions were discussed. I had a short exchange with a couple of faculty members of MIT Pune about this session. They really liked it but felt that it was a bit difficult for the student participants to comprehend but nonetheless, agreed that it was essential for the developers and users to know such details.
I attended the education panel as suggested by Amit Shah who conducted the discussions. The deliberations covered interesting exchanges about the challenges faced by an educator during teaching things related to open source software. At the same time it was unanimously agreed to take the initiative to bring to students and learners the knowledge, philosophy and benefits of open source software in spite of all the challenges.
The speaker's lounge was another place that really fascinated me. I could meet so many from the Fedora team in person, with whom I only had met over the IRC. There was Kushal Das, my mentor, and also Truong Anh Tuan, Siddhesh Poyarekar, Pravin Satpute among the ambassadors. I also had nice discussions with Kazi Nizamuddin a speaker at the conference about his experiences in introducing Fedora among school students.
There were seven parallel tracks running, so I could attend only some of the discussions. Two of the discussions that I really liked were 'Open Security for open source' by Huzafia Sidhpurwala and 'DNF the new package manager' by Parag Nemade. I also attended a nice session by Praveen Patil on Python Powered open source science lab.
My talk on 'Android Development on Fedora 21' was the one before the closing keynote of the day. I have already given a summary about it in one of my earlier posts here. The final keynote was addressed by Harish Pillay and he spoke about a tool that would analyse the development of a FOSS project. It was an important discussion for me and later in the Cocoon Hotel where the speakers were provided accommodation,  I discussed with Harish Pillay about his talk. This was something that I really took back home with great pleasure, it gave me lots of things to work, for my research on engineering open source software.
I really wanted to stay but had to return to Ranchi after the first day of the conference for some urgent work. I heard that the other two days were more exciting than the first. The swag kit given to speakers was truly awesome. (The umbrella is an eye catcher here at Ranchi).
Last but not the least the stay at the hotel was very nice and the cab in the morning was ready at 5 am to help me board my flight in time. (I had put Kushal Das in some bother about the cab timing but he really helped me with the arrangement patiently). Thank you Kushal and Amit. Thank you Fedora for making me a part of your team and giving me such a wonderful opportunity.