I attended India FOSS this past weekend. This is a log of what happened basically.

Day 0

Had some potential conflicts in the morning so I sadly missed the P5.js workshop I had signed up for. But then I got to attend the OCaml workshop. It was conducted by the people at FP Launchpad. While I have been learning a bit with OCaml, this was a very good refresher. I have some experience with Haskell, so the syntax didn't trip me. But it is always interesting to see other people come into contact with Functional programming. You go to a beginner workshop, and people ask interesting questions.

For example, OCaml has a feature wherein a recursive function defintion has a rec keyword before it.

let rec factorial n =
  if n = 0 then 1
  else n * (factorial (n-1))

Why is that? Haskell doesn't it for example. A function is a function is function , right? Turns out it's because the OCaml compiler allows you to define multiple functions with the same name. And so if the rec keyword is not specified, it will refer to a previous function's definition, not the one we intend. So in the same program, if for some reason you want to define a function named factorial, you can do so. Haskell does not allow you to do this.

Or for example, why is the let keyword everywhere? Isn't this a bit confusing to read. Somebody asked that question. Not a bad point actually. You get used to these things if you work with functional languages. But to people who are new, the friction points are very obvious. So that was very cool to see.

The workshop was great! I am doing a project in OCaml now and it's helping. So, thank you to Alina, Kaustubh, Smayan and Vimala (and anyone else I might have missed) for conducting it and answering all of our questions patiently.

Day 1

Onwards and upwards. I went for Prof KC's talk again on teaching OCaml in an interactive manner. It was a very good talk. The questions section was something else. Prof KC had mentioned that he used LLMs to build a bulk of the interactive book. So one person in the audience did something I never imagined. He asked, in the most straightforward manner "I really love teaching, but now I feel that with LLMs, I will not be able to tell my students the value of learning. Teaching is being taken away from me."

I have attended a lot of technical talks at many meet-ups. Bangalore is full of them. But never in my life have I seen someone ask a question that vulnerable. He was not saying "This is how I get my money, and it is being taken away." He was not angling to look smart, to out-think the speaker or to get attention. He was simply saying "I love doing this, it is being taken away from me and that makes me sad." Not because that was his livelihood. But because teaching was an end in and of itself for him. Sincerity? In this economy? Insane. The question was also answered thoughtfully - "For the students who want to learn, the good way of teaching will still be valuable." And in the span of that interaction, I realised something was different about this event. Put a pin on it.

Walked around a bit. And then I met Kajal from the WE program. The WE program, I have written about it here before. Kajal is one of the "usual suspects" as Asokan would say, who comes to our regular Sunday meetups. I recognised her and went to say hi. Good decision past me. She was volunteering for the event, along with her friend Navya. Over the course of event, these two girls just adopted me basically. I got to have lunch in the special section because I was with them. Ha! Seated lunch in a nice-ish secluded spot, oh the joys of life.

More importantly, I saw that there was a Community-Con. This was going to be a 10 minute talk selected based on votes from attendees. Now my CFPs had been rejected twice from IndiaFOSS. So I didn't have many hopes. I talked to both of them, and they were kindly encouraged me to apply. I was still a bit unsure, but I managed to propose a talk. Put a second pin on it.

Hardware! There was a separate section for the hardware products. They had a tiny robot on that was holding a brush, dipping it in paint, and then working on a canvas. Crazy. And there were startups selling PCB software. There was a lab by students from Ashoka university, where they had 3D printed the Kanchenjunga mountains. Gorgeous stuff. Saw a random girl just moving around in a makeshift car. Good for her.

The Cool Painting Robot

A crowd pleaser

IndiaFOSS has the genius idea to do Devroom by other communities. In DevRooms, the independent community organisers handle everything. I was mostly hanging out in the compilers Devroom only. AJ from FP India did a talk on strong static types and why they are important. It was great, but I know him, so I knew it would be great. Again, people were asking actually good questions. What was happening?

Hazy Picture of the overcrowded Compilers Devroom

I then went to attend Varuni's (again fellow WE program alumni) birds of a feather session on diversity. This was a really really good session. It was about what communities can do beyond just grants for encouraging diversity. Varuni, Ruchika and Suchitra, shoutout to them truly. The session was informal, but had a good structure. People were able to speak quite frankly about their troubles. Especially now, in this time when EDI has become less fashionable. And the consequences of that in their lives.

They had the brilliant idea towards the end, that each person would take two post-it notes. On one, write down an opportunity you can open the door for. Could be anything, but something you can help someone else with. And on the other, something you need help with. Some opportunity you are looking for. I was a bit worried i'd not have any opportunities to give. But then people started giving small ones. Like helping with reviewing CFPs to programs you have been accepted to. Then I was able to think of some things which I could help someone else with. And boy if that isn't a good feeling.

Day 2

Went a bit late to day 2. It was a Sunday but the place was still packed. I had prepared since the previous night for my proposed talk. I wasn't sure if I'd be selected, results would be announced later. But we hope for the best, and prep for the worst. I spoke to the people at SciPy India. The people from Paper crane labs who made some very cool visualisations. I have been to their lab and done laser cutting. But still it was amazing to see the some of this stuff.

And then the time came for results. My talk had been selected. Who these 41 people were who voted for me, I have zero clue. But thank you to them. So I went and prepared some more. I was quite nervous. Again, Kajal and Navya graciously offered to help me prepare. As much as I could within an hour.

I met the wonderful Niya during the event. We kept crossing paths throughout. She recommended a talk by the head of Data for India. She does data journalism. This was quite interesting. The government publishes a lot more data than I realised. Which is it's own can of worms. I have been reading the work of Robert Caro. Will write about it some other day. But basically Robert Caro is an autobiographer who digs deep. He will find out the exact amount a civil servant took as a bribe in 1922. But one thing he mentions is that these facts, while they exists, they are also a story. The truth does not come unadorned. And she spoke quite beautifully, very frankly. She was calm and poised. And her task is to present that data. But keep it as close to the source of the truth, while telling a story. Not easy at all. Great work.

Community Con

There were 7 community talks selected. One of them was Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha! I had spoken to him on Day 1. He was quite thoughtful. His talk was amazing. But how am I supposed to go after him? Half the people in the hall left after him. Which, I confess, relieved me a bit. Regardless I was quite nervous. This was a main hall, it was huge. But I tried to remain calm.

There was a talk before me on running linux on phones by Shantanu Khedkar. It was great! I later found out that he is in 11th grade! Crazy! So smart. He is going places.

And then I gave my talk. It was basically the previous blog. But I tried to demo everything I could. I could have done a better job I think. While I was able to present a story of the zombie apocalypse I missed the main point. Distributed by default? That was the question I asked in the beginning. But did not answer properly. Elixir/Erlang programs don't care about where your node is. As long as it's resolvable, they will run communicate. That is the point.

Regardless, a nice photo from the talk. Zombie picture credits to Fred Hebert.

And a thank you to AJ from FPIndia for this photo.

I left soon after. Let us remove the first pin. The reason this event worked was that there was a good mixture of things being discussed, with a good spirit that too. On the one hand there are technical sessions, then there are session on data journalism. A strudel session! People were genuinely excited for the talks. I saw people looking at their phone calendars, jumping from hall to hall. I think that the less corporate feel of the event was probably one of the reasons. There were mostly students there. Which probably contributed to the feel of "college techfest but for adults."

Companies were present, but they did not take over the event. I recall one of the sponsors telling me that sponsorship did not result in a "reserved" speaking spot. It probably leads to a bias in speaker selection. But it's still not handed over to a company. The CFPs are open for all. And while they have a likes based system I am not a big fan of, the likes don't guarantee a speaking slot. People with very few likes also got to speak. The event network, was frankly better than other much bigger hackathons and events I have gone to, was setup by a bunch of kids from NITK. They had to lug the kilos of cable around. God bless them.

But it was really fun. I will be a repeat customer. Hopefully, see you all next year!

Post Notes

I went to one of the booths, and there, met a person from my college. So naturally I started singing the song. NMI - he cut me off and said in a beleagured voice, "Please. Don't.". So it goes.

Once, at a separate conference, a wonderful person who shall remain unnamed was with me. They saw the word OCaml written somewhere and said oh "Orange County Association of Machine Learning". And then some researcher SLOWLY turned around and looked at them with a what I imagine was just a "Whattt are you saying?" glare. So in my heart it is always OCaML.

After my talk, some people came up to talk to me about FP! So that is great. Most importantly, some people from FP India actually gave me constructive feedback. That was great! Was able to fix some things in the previous blog. Grateful to all of them.