My journey to MumbaiFOSS and my experience there

I’m doing my 2nd-year diploma in computer engineering. I have always been a huge fan of FOSS such as GNU/Linux, it was the reason I chose computer engineering but unfortunately, there was nothing in-depth on it in my course curriculum. I had seen people share posters of a FOSS event called IndiaFOSS on LinkedIn. I just looked up about it on the internet, it was conducted by FOSS United, a foundation that aims at promoting and strengthening the FOSS ecosystem in India. It was held in Bengaluru, far away from where I lived and my parents wouldn’t let me travel alone if I asked.

Despite the disheartening turn of events, I never gave up on my desire to attend a FOSS event. The next year, when a similar FOSS event called MumbaiFOSS was conducted by FOSS United in IIT Bombay. I decided that it was finally time for me to go. I asked my parents if they would allow me, and they agreed.

So, armed with some cash and fervor, I set off from Solapur to attend MumbaiFOSS on a local train for a journey of almost 500 km to reach the venue. I couldn’t sleep that night because of the excitement and the snoring of the sleeping passengers nearby. I reached Thane station in the early morning and got off the train. I took another local train from Thane to Kanjurmarg station. I reached Kanjurmarg station, I fell while getting off the train and I had a minor wound but I was more worried about whether my laptop was damaged. After checking laptop was safe, I took a rickshaw from there to Gate 2 of IIT Bombay. Being from a small city, I was excited to see an IIT campus for the first time, that too one of the best IITs in India. The campus was very beautiful, neat, and clean.

Once there, I ate a non-affordable breakfast outside the campus and then caught up with my telegram friend @MisanthropyDK (we met for the first time), and saw many peeps in the tech industry. I had a conversation with a white-haired man who was a Fedora fanboi and had years of experience in the FOSS industry, he was like an Indian version of Richard Stallman. From that conversation, it felt like age did not matter nor did the skillset each one of us carried with us, everything felt equal when we interacted. One thing I remember he said was, “All technologies are inter-related, some people are narrow minded they study only one technology and try to master it, that’s the reason why they cannot inter-relate with other technologies.”. I felt very motivated to keep up my hunger for learning many and not ust one.

The first talk about the Prav app. The speakers gave a fantastic explanation of why XMPP, Matrix, and other open-source chat platforms are better to use. And they were able to convince the sense of privacy and control of these platforms. I was convinced that I should switch to Matrix.

The electronic field-related project which included eSIM made by Mr. Sumanto Kar and Mr. Nagesh Karmali was very cool. After a tea break, it was the talk on WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication). And this was the time when I came to know about servers like STUN and TURN that are used to create P2P connections when building a real-time application. And a lot more about the protocols used in WebRTC.

And then walks in Mr. Ashish Sahni who blew my mind. His topic was one of the hardest ones for me to digest, I mean it was a way too advanced topic than others. It was all about the data architecture and how powerful data fabrication. Honestly speaking, I don’t have much to tell about this. So I’ll back off from this.

The next talk was by Mr. Poruri Sai Rahul, an energetic and talented guy. His talk was about Digital Personal Data Protection Bills (DPDPB). This was again a new topic for me. And this talk was the one I enjoyed the most. In short, the bill was about the protection of your data collected from whatever online platform you use. It may be a search engine or any other app. He started with a game called “Cost and Benefits”. What we had to do was just point out when the Cost and Benefits were high in a particular paragraph from the Data Bill. In my opinion, this was the only talk that was very interactive of all.

Then comes the fireside chat with Mr. Kailash Nadh. Those moments made me realize what life can be like beyond college lectures, it opened up a range of opportunities that didn’t seem possible before thanks to networking opportunities provided by events such as this one.

Rant Alert

The fireside chat with Kailash Nadh was an eye-opening experience that made me understand that we are just a bunch of scum in college who yet don’t know anything more advanced. It’s just 0.0000001℅ of the basics we engineering students know. We should be knowing and doing stuff that is far more advanced than the current scenario. I won’t blame anyone and I don’t even know whom should I blame. There are very less students in an engineering institute who care about tech and are fascinated by the processes. Everyone mostly runs behind being a topper, getting a good college ahead for being a grad. There are a lot of things that are unknown in this internet world that we yet need to explore and keep advancing with them.

This experience gave me a whole new perspective on life & technology. If anyone thinks attending such events is expensive, it was only INR 1600/- for train tickets, food, and registration.