Using Scrapy to crawl websites

A wonderful tool Scrapy came to my notice that can be conveniently used to crawl websites. It has many good features and I tested it successfully on Fedora 25. I am using it currently to do a bit of data mining and data analysis.

Fedora Friends: unique experience in FUDCon Phnom Penh

It was a wonderful experience meeting great folks at Phnom Penh during the FUDCon organised there last month. With some I was already acquainted with from the FUDCon at Pune. With others it was the first meeting. During the event I got to know another wonderful side of Open Source Projects in general and of Fedora in particular and that is the wonderful friendship that develops between collaborators and contributors. Sitting together, encouraging each other, helping to learn and many more things that might seem trivial but have tremendous importance in this selfish world. You won't even know that you are sitting beside and talking to one of the finest engineers of the day. And even if you know very little, there is no inferiority feeling among such wonderful people. It is easy to get haughty and develop ego about the things that we learn and do but not to go that way was one of the biggest things that I took home from Phnom Penh FUDCon.

You should contribute and continue to meet such great folks - I told myself again and again. The talks were great. Rain played spoilsport on the second day, but for me I learnt much and started contributing in areas that I had not touced upon earler. The event ended with the FUDpub and that too was nicely organised with lots of good food, beer and all. There was a sweet telegram group to keep people informed and in touch. And we continued posting in it till we all reached home safely and some continued even after that 😃😃😃😃😃😃

A Rich Conclave of Fedora Contributers: FUDCon Phnom Penh

It was great to be a part of FUDCon Phnom Penh and that too as a speaker. Only lucky ones do get such a wonderful opportunity. Furthermore, it was an extravagant and rich conclave of developers and users of Fedora. And it was  a rare opportunity for me to meet extraordinary people, prolific contributors and great friends in the making. It was a rare opportunity to sit by them, listen to them and learn from them. Their contributions so wonderful, their talks and workshops so productive and useful. Since there were three parallel tracks running, I could not hear many of the discussions (as one can't participate in more than one place at a time). So I can only admire the talks of Parag Nemade on 'How to Globalize your software', of Alex Eng on 'Zanata: Translation Platform', of Harish Pillay on 'The final balance of Projects and Products', of Robert Mayr on 'News from the council', of Gerard Braad on 'Project Atomic', of Ryan Lerch on 'Portable Dev Environments with Vagrant', of Kushal Das on 'Testting Fedora Atomic Hosts in an automated way' and of Siddesh Poyarekar on 'Hello World: Revisiting the first C program we write'.

These were highly interactive sessions with participants asking many interesting questions. The talks were very helpful and opened up many possible ways of contributing to the Fedora Project. Besides the above talks there were others which I did not get the opportunity of attending as there were parallel sessions working. This was my second FUDCon. The first one was at Pune where I could attend only for a single day. I missed many interesting talks there but this time I could make up for it and learn a lot.

This FUDCon was significant for me not only from the view point of having learnt many things to work with but also due to the fact that I could sit and talk with many important people, the likes of Brian Exelbierd, Harish Pillay, Ryan Lerch, Robert Mayr and Kushal Das. I was absolutely awestruck at the tremendous effort put in by Sirko Kemter and his team in organising the event. Besides there were so many other engineers and contributors like Gerard Braad, Alex Eng, Siddesh Poyarekar, Jens Peterson, Noriko Mizumoto, Parag Nemade, Sumantro Mukherjee, Sayan Chowdhury, Nisha Poyarekar, Estu Fardani, Anwesha Das, Srijan Agarwal and Abhinand. 

The talks were great, the evenings were wonderful, friendship all around and the inspiration to contribute made the event truly memorable for me. There was a sweet telegram group which kept us in contact with each other throughout the event, till we all reached home. And here I am posting in my blog in the honour of this event as something that I will cherish reading long after.

My First International FOSS Event: FUDCon Phnom Penh

It was a privilege to be a speaker at FUDCon, Cambodia 2016. This being my first international FOSS event was ever more exciting. Right from the day I received the invitation from Sirko, I felt extremely privileged. On reaching the place I found that the event was much bigger than what I had expected it to be. There was a bar camp being organised by the university with over 5000 participants. Simply speaking it was a grand and huge occasion.

My talk started just after the opening keynote and it was on 'Android Development on Fedora'. Android being a popular name and Fedora being a increasingly popular Linux distribution attracted lots of enthusiastic listeners to my talk. The discussion focused mainly on configuring Fedora for Android Development. It covered many programming languages like native code, python, html, java, etc. I also spoke in details about the command line tools and also the IDEs available for this purpose.

The discussion covered detailed aspects like setting environment variables, setting path for JDK, SDK and other things. There was discussion about build tools like ant and maven, about emulators and smart phone devices and about wrappers like phonegap. I showed the audience that everything works seamlessly on Fedora. I would always stress upon the fact that Android development in any form can be done well on Fedora as a Fedora machine can be configured perfectly to achieve these targets. 

Among the IDEs I spoke about Android Studio. Android studio has the gradle building tool.There is intelligent code completion and superb  support for installing emulators. Besides one can go for cloud integration with the help of Android Studio. The discussion covered the installation of different tools related to android development such as the SDK and NDK. A discussion about how graphic designs can be shown using native code and NDK caught the attention of everyone.

Besides this there were many other talks by people from the Fedora community and other participants of the bar camp that were excellent in content and nature. I shall discuss about those talks and workshops in a subsequent blog post and there may also be a blog post talking about my experience and what I learnt from this FUDCon at Cambodia.