Open Source India 2022
Open Source India (OSI)
Similar to the IndiaFOSS 2.0 event, I scrolled through my LinkedIn feed and stumbled across a post that mentioned that the Open Source India 2022 conference will be held on the 29th and 30th of September 2022. Again, thankfully ICT4D Austria took over my expenses for traveling, staying, and visiting the event. I looked forward to a great and informative two-day event at NIMHANS Convention Center in Bengaluru with interesting and like-minded participants like the FOSS event and a great conference with interesting and state-of-the-art topics about Open-Source and networking within the community.
Getting to the conference
This time, getting to the conference was quite an adventure. Firstly, I could not buy a ticket in advance, because no available payment provider was accepting foreign credit cards. Luckily the support was so friendly to assign a ticket to my account without paying anything in advance. I just had to pay directly at the conference location in cash. Sadly I missed the last bus the day before the conference in Bengaluru. So my new plan was to take an early bus in the morning at about 0500 AM. Somehow I forgot to plug in my phone, it went out of battery during the night and I missed the alarm. When I woke up, I rushed to the bus station and got the 1030 AM bus. Due to the very nice traffic in Bengaluru, we arrived very late at about 0300 to 0400 PM. I wanted to drop my luggage at the hotel and just go straight to the conference to pay for the ticket and maybe get a glimpse of the last sessions. As I arrived at the hotel, I was told that the booking of the room I did in advance could not be found and that they did not have any rooms available. So I had to find another hotel and sadly missed the whole first day of the conference.
At the conference
Compared to the FOSS 2.0 event, there were much fewer students at the conference. I met many developers from the local developer scene in Bengaluru, and a few from other parts of India. Also, MV Karan gave another talk about the usage of GitHub in India with the title Let’s build from here, in India. I am a huge fan of the India GitHub repo with various resources and information for the developer community in India. The other thing, that I like about those Open-Source conferences is the talks about the Open-Source journey of some product and/or developer team. It is interesting to see and hear the arguments for using Open-Source software in building a product or solution. Especially to hear about challenges or failures during development and how they got solved is fascinating and contains a lot of helpful information. Devtron’s Open-Source Journey was an interesting talk. Especially because the importance of failing fast gets highlighted in this talk.
Altogether it was a great conference with interesting and state-of-the-art topics about Open-Source. It was also a great opportunity to meet and do some networking with developers of the Open-Source community in Bengaluru and India. This time not only with the community but also with big players like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others. I enjoy taking opportunities like those conferences to talk about ideas, projects, problems, and opinions. It generates new ideas, and solutions and opens new possibilities for my projects and ideas that I want to share and also develop further.