There were five halls and a ball-room which had sessions running in parallel. Each of the halls was named after a famous open-source personality – Torvalds hall, Stallman hall, Cox hall, etc.
I enjoyed being there and it was very inspiring to know about the work of the speakers.
I attended Rasmus’ talk on cross-site scripting detection and prevention. His talk on deploying large-scale PHP was very useful too because there were some useful general points in it. Starting from an example of writing a simple and scalable webpage hit monitor, he went on to discuss various configurations for setting up replication in MySQL which are highly scalable.
I found the talk by Gopalarathnam Venkatesan on programming the Mozilla platform using XUL very interesting. After attending the half-hour talk, I felt confident enough to dig my hands into XUL.
The talk by Gopal Vijayaraghavan on DotGNU was very informative too. I am very interested in .NET and Gopal was in the news for having ported DotGNU to Simputer within 72 hours and hence my interest in his talk. He mentioned the problems he had faced as a developer and how you end up doing everything that nobody wants to do when you are a lead developer. It was an informative talk.
Glancer is a real cool app which anyone attending foss.in can use to plan his schedules and find people who have similar interests as him. Nirav Mehta talked about the process of building Glancer using OpenLaszlo, the technical issues they faced, etc.
Premshree introduced the audience to Ruby in his presentation while Avik Sengupta wrote a cookbook application from scratch in his presentation by using Ruby on Rails.
I met (in no particular order) Rajaram, Swaroop, Sumeet, Philip, Premshree, Gopal, Suhas and Pradeep. It was quite exciting to meet the people behind the blogs that I had been reading. Often a mere mention of CarryOnCoding.com was enough to help them recognize me instantly. Swaroop even gave me a sneak peek on his yet-to-be-launched website running on TurboGears, a web development framework for Python.
I am strong believer in the merits of open-source and it was truly inspiring to see people dedicate an enormous amount of energy and time into building interesting and often challenging stuff and then sharing the code with everyone by making it open-source.
Visit my moblog for more pictures that I took at the conference.
