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.
