FOSS.in/2009 Day 2: KDE ftw!
Posted: Dec 03, 2009, 20:32We started off quite late for the event today, just after 10:00 AM. I tried sitting somewhere to continue hacking on the chat windows but could not get myself together at all, so ended up wandering around killing time waiting for Lennart's talk. I also wanted to attend Ram2's talk on the python compiler design, but it was at the same time as the PulseAudio talk. I gave up on Ram2's talk because the PulseAudio talk seemed more relevant to what I did and promised to be quite interesting.
The PulseAudio talk was (as mentioned in the abstract) not a talk on PulseAudio at all. It was a sort of a "best practices" guide on using system calls, etc. It was quite an interesting talk. One amazing thing that Lennart pointed out was the lack of a async DNS resolver function, something that I witnessed with ayttm as well and had to work around by spawning a separate thread for connections.
Post-lunch, I decided to check out what was going on in the KDE project of the day. I entered to find the hall nearly full of people and was quite surprised. The result was that I could not sit there due to the fact that my laptop was running low on battery power — all the charging points were taken. I went back to the Fedora booth and sat there waiting for my laptop to charge up while I tinkered around with random stuff.
By the time I got back to the POTD, a lot of stuff was already done, but I managed to witness a couple of really interesting events and realized why the hall was nearly full. For one, everything seemed to be perfectly managed, with Pradeepto at the helm coordinating things and a bunch of others working together amazingly well. Companies rehearse again and again to get such coordination and I can vouch for the fact that Pradeepto and gang did not rehearse during the past few days :)
The session in the POTD that really caught my eye was the Bug fixing event. It was a perfect example of how to introduce students to more complex code and how to avoid intimidating them. Aakarsh sat down with one of the delegates to resolve a bug in KStars and then got the delegate to demonstrate to everyone how he investigated the bug. The demonstration would surely have encouraged everyone to believe that even they could contribute to the code base, small steps at a time. This was followed by Sujith's demonstration of a few bug fixes, which was also quite cool.
I ended the day chatting with Krishnakant and Anusha (the GNUKhata hackers) about GNUKhata and other random stuff and came back to the hotel room early. Now we'll go for dinner somewhere downstairs and probably gather for the usual nightly foobar BoF session.
Finally, hats off to Pradeepto for KDE POTD; it was beautifully coordinated!