RK's Rambling

Each year Rice University holds an annual Hackathon for everyone to participate and code away their weekend. All the students who participate trade away their sleep for a weekend to build something cool in 36 hours and showcase it. That's how hackathons are and that's the thrill of it. And I love that thrill. I love taking part in Hackathons. It's a way for me to work on my ideas, hobby projects which I always wanted but never could, because of the classic time crunch of being a graduate student at Rice. Classes, Research and Valhalla take away most of your time and you hardly get enough time to work on your side projects. My affair with HackRice  goes back to 2014 when I first participated in HackRice from Dallas and won the Mastery Of Computer Science award by the department of computer science. That kickstarted a snowball effect which is responsible for much of what I am today. But that story is for another day and demands another blog post all by itsel

It's almost no secret that I love Open Source Bridge. There are plenty of super awesome developer conferences out there. A lot of which I never visited. But even among the ones I was fortunate enough to visit, Open Source Bridge is very special. This all-volunteer run conference has a special place in my heart and this time it was my third time visiting it. The first two times were pretty interesting for me too. The very first time I visited Open Source Bridge was in 2015, to talk about my first contribution to Firefox OS Keyboard . It was my first talk at a conference in the United States, and at a developer conference. Needless to say, I was pretty tensed and excited as well. I still remember that talk, and also OSB made a video of the talk so that I would not forget -_- In 2016, I was invited to present a talk regarding some IoT work which at that time was still important to Mozilla. OSB stopped recording videos from that year, but this resulted in an opensource.com article w