Skip to main content

OpenSource Bridge 2016: Back among the Open Source Citizens


 

I recently gave a talk in OpenSource Bridge in Portland. This was my second time taking a session here, the first one being on Firefox OS (sigh) last year. My session was on 23rd June, the penultimate day of the conference and the same day when I finally reached portland at 12:50 AM. Since the talk was at 10:45 AM. I spend the rest of the night quickly juggling up my slides and last minute code pushes in github.

Last minute talks are nothing new to me, being the star procrastrinator among all the Mozilla TechSpeakers. But this time I was a little nervous and wanted the talk to go smooth since this had generated a little bit of attention due to an awesome article from Benjamin (which you can read here).

And the tweets followed




And a few others. So I thought...no pressure...no pressure....and then...I still don't have my slides prepared. (double sigh).
And of course when my friends started telling me I was being featured in their LinkedIn Stories

No Pressure, Right?

Then comes the day (actually it already was the day) and I arrived at the venue. Traditionally last year as well as this year it was hosted in Elliot Center, just in the middle of Portland Downtown (or I thought it is). I always love the way they organize #OSB, and specially how laid back and relaxing the hacker lounge is. And did I mention the have a lot of charging ports? A LOT of it?

I quickly grabbed a cup of coffee and went to my assigned room, just to find it completely full and people were standing on the back to hear! No Pressure.... The talk however went surprisingly smooth and the audience really liked it! This time just for the kicks I had also given a QR code in my slides along with a github link to the codes I had talked about, and I saw a few people actually scanning it too along with snapping a pic (yay!). And that brings me to my metrics (of course I had that qr code tracked!)


Not bad I thought, taking into count that they checked out the code from the room itself(and just the QR code was tracked)! I had 5 mins in my mind for questions, which spilled over of course. And the session planner didn't mind since he had a few questions of his own too (more yay!). That kind of continued through my walk to have some food with some other speakers and incidentally my audience.
Meanwhile Benjamin managed to catch me while answering a query


After the food I attended a few more sessions and wrapped up for the day. Of course before wrapping up noticed how we were plotting for world domination....



OpenSource Bridge always stands out from other conferences fro being a more intimate experience for me. You get to see so much diverse talks in varied topics by so many awesome people. And you can actually talk and engage with them. Not always the case for big conferences like OpenIoT.  Also I found it always easy to engage with people in a closer group and get feedback about my talk. That always helps me to try to get better. And OpenSource Bridge is a awesome platform for me in that respect.

And how can I end a trip report without reporting the reaction? So from next day (actually from that very day) in my twitter...


I can neither confirm, nor deny talking about a rooted device :P
Always humbled by such response

 That Sir, didn't cross my mind...
This is the best outcome I ever want from any of my talks. People getting interested and using it to build something!

I ended OpenSource Bridge 2016 in a very good note and actually being inspired (and I thought #Mozlondon had me inspired already!)

Obligatory "Distant looking" snap. Courtesy: Benjamin

Most of the pictures I used in the blog post are snapped by Benjamin Kerensa. You can check out his flickr album if you want to have a feel of how it was in #OSB16

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning.  This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who...
Read more

April Fool and Google Part 2: A Round Up of ALL of Google’s April Fools Jokes

Ok....this post I think will contain all of the pranks I could find  for today. After my last post here http://rkrants.blogspot.com/2012/04/april-fool-and-google-my-favorite.html Last Time I reported Only a handful of the pranks.. Understandable, as it was only the morning. After that I stumbled upon more of them Which I am gonna round up here. Now staring with the list. The very first one is obviously our favourite Google Maps Quest The above is their official video. In a post in Google Plus they say about it as follows  Today  + Google Maps  announced Google Maps 8-bit for NES. With #8bitmaps , you can do everything you'd normally do in Maps—search for famous landmarks and sites around the world, get directions and even use Street View. Just in time for April Fool's Day, Google has introduced Google Maps Quest, a retro 8-bit version of its mapping tool that is... totally awesome. In a characteristically whimsical video, availabl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Curious case of Cisco AnyConnect and WSL2

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home  is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant  as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble  alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have...
Post a Comment
Read more