Ok, I am late to report the day 3 activities, but I will write up anyways! It was another exciting day at Foss.In. Looks like things get better everyday actually! I did not attend many talks, just hung around and talked to people.
Andrew Cowie’s keynote Inside | Outside was amazing. I have seen the fan following Andrew created last year, and I am added to his huge fan list now! He has the right mix of technology, business and common sense. He has done work on FOSS, and advocates it with passion. I especially liked his take on “Linux” being a better way to call it, rather than “GNU/Linux”. When I heard RMS the first time, I was sold on the “GNU/Linux” argument, but when I heard Andrew’s part, I started thinking! There were so many other strong points he made (Swaroop wrote more about them), I liked the one about communicating and “not being a jerk”! I strongly suggest you to see Andrew’s presentation, and get hold of the podcast when it’s available.
The other interesting session was Danese Cooper’s “How to make a FOSS presentation“. She gave guidelines in public speaking, making presentations. She said “Nothing bad can happen when you give a FOSS presentation”. The number one fear people have is public speaking. As a part of the session, she did lightening talks. I think this was a superb exercise for the session. And it reminded me of the communication sessions we carried out in Magnet. I wanted to share about “Creating the future” technique, which gave us tremendous results while public speaking. I think what we did was very similar to what Danese did. We observed the same patterns and had pretty much the same suggestions to people. Go grab the slides when they are up!
The Glancer BoF was great and I have already written about it. The Webservices BoF was great too. With some heated arguments between SOAP and REST! It was a good learning experience though. As a matter of fact, the definition of Web services itself is hazy. Anything that exchanges data between two machines could be a webservice – need not be SOAP / REST / Whatever. It could be a simple HTTP request! The explanation of how Flickr implements their security system, was good learning too.
Dinner at Atul’s place was great. Foss.In guys take very good care of their speakers. And every year, Atul throws a dinner for speakers. I think this is one of the other great things about Foss.In. It just connects you with so many people and the bond keeps working.
As if the whole day’s discussions were not enough, I, Indranil and Arvind chatted up about business models and growth pangs of small companies using FOSS over coffee past midnight. Everybody faces similar challenges. I believe it’s a general business phenomenon – businesses grow from being a group of hackers, to small companies to medium sized companies. Some grow bigger. Some die midway. We have grown good over the last seven years, and I feel we have a long way to go. And it’s fun to be an entrepreneur!
Good for now! More later! Don’t forget to checkout planet.foss.in and some pictures on Flickr.