openSUSE Asia Summit 2019, Bali

When you travel for the very first time Internationally there are lot of things going in your head. Especially for someone like me, who is a vegetarian and is travelling all alone with no experience of flight. I was a lot nervous, was thinking about the culture of the place I am going, was nervous about flight itself, I watched a lot of “How to save yourselves” videos while travelling in flights. 🤫

So, yeah it was pretty messed up.

When, I was boarding the plane, my mom called me in last 10 mins, said news is going on about some “terrorists” entering Delhi (where my flight was), she was really really nervous and at one point I said “Do you want me to leave everything and abort?”, well no 😅

So, yeah a fully nervousness filled journey started, I boarded Singapore Airlines and damn it was A380, my first International flight and that too with a jumbo, I forgot all the things as soon as I entered the plane.

I gotta tell you, from the very start, I started realizing how well humanity can be, air hostess/host were taking so good care of the passengers, I felt so welcome and I guess indebted that my words aren’t just enough.

I mean, I can joke about this and say “At one point it felt like this much care I don’t even get from my parents”😉 

I was in the flight, slept for a while ( It was midnight flight) , and then it hit me, I saw that crew was up whole the time making sure that we sleep well, I was so touched by this, and I reached out to the crew and talked about this, they were very welcoming and talked about their job and I had a nice talk with them, All of the whole experience was just so nice.

In the end, they reached out to me, and shared a token of gratitude, they gave me “Singapore airlines playing cards and a ball point pen”, with a letter that they enjoyed having me as a passenger. Well, I was not aiming for any gifts or something, I just went to them and asked about their job and appreciated their hard-work genuinely.

I still manage to store this precious memory 🙂

Hope to see you again Mr. Westwood

I had a layover in Changi Airport, Singapore. And yes it’s absolutely worth the hype on Internet. I mean it’s really high tech, lots of recreational stuff, amazing gardens and you get to see “The Jewel”, also operations wise they do their best!

You will have a good time layover-ing in Singapore :p

Now, until this point, you should have got the idea that how comfortable I would have got so far. Yep!, that’s correct 🙂

I reach Bali, it was a 1-1.5 hour flight from Singapore. Comfort was gone … well because I never experienced foreign exchange yet, and I had to reach the hotel somehow. So, I was thinking to myself can I pay online ?, Do I use my ATM ?, Do I buy sim card here ?, Do I exchange few dollars which I got with me here only ? ….. so on… after a lot of nervousness and search in and outside of the airport I exchanged few dollars just slightly above my taxi far and reach my hotel.

Pheww 😪 , First test over!

Now, I checked in rested for that day, on 5th October was my conference next day.

Day 1

I reach the venue 1.7 Km away on a sunny day (It was hot) , but foot , well because It did not hit me that moment Motor bike ride app Gojek and Grab exist there.

Here, I was welcomed by the kind volunteers, after few paperwork of attendance, I got my welcome kit 😋

Woah, it was goodylicious 😉

:p There was a bottle too, not in this picture

I then attended few talks, one of them was about creating open source communities in Indonesia where the main focus was on students. Being a student myself I took part in that discussion. Then another one was by Mr. Segitz where from Suse, where he talked about how Suse takes security bugs, how they handle them, critical bugs etc etc..

I asked him about something similar to Android, where you restrict apps based on the permissions, he said it is a good idea and can be discussed. Niel added on about “Flatpak” on this discussion and yeah it’s a good idea 🙂 Flatpak has those things already :p

I met, Ahmad Haris for the very first time, can;t forget his custom shoes 😉 he was showing off that moment :p , he managed to get them done by “FANS” I mean he’s a CEO haha (As per him :p)

I met more GNOME folks there for the very first time, I mean that feeling when you meet the folks behind IRC and chats for the first time. Yeah it was phenomenal, just makes me more excited about upcoming GUADECs. I just want to meet everyone :p

So, there in openSUSE summit, we had a little GNOME world 🙂 , Ahamad, Kukuh, Rania, Shobha, Rosanna, Neil and others 🤗

It was a really great day.

I gotta say, I had doubts about Inodensia culture in general, my stereotypical family was worried because there it was majority of relegion which I do not belong to, and other stuff.

But, to be honest, I have never met such respectful, generous, helpful people in my entire little life that I have met in Indonesia. They are just the best humans out there!

Oh, that’s our little cute “minix” :p (I gave her a nickname) and the University campus was extremely beautiful with a really cool view of the Sea 🙂

I met many cool folks from Japan and China openSUSE community!, It’ just gets better and better when you meet folks from around the FOSS world. We all are working for same goal, to make the world a better a place! I have described in my previous GNOME Asia blog already that FOSS can make a huge impact in lives of people. It has tremendous possibilities, and when I personally saw the companies like “FANS” getting value out of it I was stunned and really happy 🙂

Day 2

I attended Niel’s talk, and loved how he swept in GNOME education challenge at the end of the talk because yeah the talk got over few minutes early 😉

Then, one of the really amazing talk was by Mr. Takeyama from Japanese community, they are doing a really great job out there to increase Japanese support on the magazing FOSS tools by personally contributing. And the coolest part is they have “Geeko Magazine” published every 6 months where they personally manage all the things. And have cool Japanese styled animation covers too 😋.

He generously gave me a sample, but sadly it does not have a Manga like animated cover , but yeah still a cool stuff to have :p

If you happen to visit Japan and get a chance to attend Comiket festival they do have a stall there grab those before stock gets over (Really Limited)

Credits: https://blog.geeko.jp/category/geeko-magazine

My Treasure 😉

When I went back to hotel on the second day, the openSUSE bottle broke , I got sad, really because it was cool. I asked Kukuh that will it be possible to have an extra left and if he can get that in GNOME Asia, and wow to my surprise it worked out and he arranged one for me. Now I have it safe with me 🙂

Thanks a lot Kukuh! , means a lot!

My cracked bottle

I am really astonishingly amazed by the great Indonesian People, their culture, their FOSS community specially, how well they manage to organize such beautiful events, and the fact that how linked they are, I mean most of the organizing committee in GNOME Asia and the participants were in openSUSE too 🙂

The best part is, even working people take out their time collaborate with the University staff and students and make these amazing events happen.

To be honest I am a bit Jealous of the community there, hope we have that presence in India too 🙂

Thank you everyone out there who made this event happen and took care of the participants and speakers! , I would definitely like to give a talk next time there 🙂

And for all of you did not make it there, yeah you missed a lot :p

*Note: I would really like to know in the comments if you are interested to know about Bali Tourism, this post got a bit long, if there is a good response I would really love to share the journey 🙂

Peace ✌️ 

Hope to meet you all back again!

GNOME Asia 2019

I feel very emotional and excited while sharing my first ever GNOME+ FOSS + International conference experience with you all.

So let’s get started.

Before starting my journey I was really nervous as I never traveled outside my homeland, I was travelling alone, I am a pure vegetarian and I am someone who fear air travel 😥  (but not anymore :p)

Speaker 😎 , Loved the Design Team’s Work !

So, firstly and foremost I would like to thanks a lot lot lot lot …… to local committee for making everything smooth and already planned for the guests and speakers. You folks did a lot of hard work, were awake till late nights to make sure next day goes alright and what not. The local committee was so so helpful and gracious that they arranged us an 45 KM+ far Airport pickup, Awesome venue, Lunch (And for me I was vegetarian they took care of that also) , and I think almost everyday at the conference there was some sort of Dinner party organized by them, the city tour, great swags, lots of love and support.

It’s the people of Indonesia and local team which made all of my fear went away as soon as I entered the Indonesian land.

From local team, I can’t remember all the names but those I remember I would love to share Mr. Andik , Mr. Ahmad Haris, Mr. Kukuh ,Mr. Jordan, Mr. Mohammad Fadhil, Mr. Firdaus etc …. To me personally now it feels like I left a family back there and I miss you all ! Everyone of you were really friendly and made us feel at home 😭 

Day 0,

There was inauguration ceremony, and later on Newcomer’s workshop 🙂 , I took sometime to figure out the huge campus and missed a bit from the starting half of the day 😦 , When I arrived the next schedule was for Newcomer’s workshop which was organized by Felipe, Me and Sajeer Ahmad. Sadly Felipe wasn’t able to attend the conference but he kindly took time out and was available online helping us out the whole time.

Our workshop was for 3 hrs which was like the only thing apart from the other workshop parallel to ours that day.

In this workshop we had quite a good amount of attendees where some came from far off distances like 200+ KM which made me feel more excited and honored about organizing it.

I talked about the GNOME application projects which are a good way to start, newcomers wiki, Introduction to Git concepts, Role of IRC for a newcomer, our Gitlab infrastructure, GNOME builder 🥰 , code reviews etc.

Audience was fairly new to GNOME technologies, FOSS development and internet was not so fast at that location so it became a bit hard for us to solve and solve issues then and there, So I took another approach and demonstrated them how to solve bugs using my development setup and some of the bugs which were already solved and were easily visible in our gitlab, this also gave me a chance to explain how to submit patches on gitlab and how discussion look like there.

I also got a chance to explain them about Git as my friend Exalm once pointed out during newcomers IRC discussions long time ago that ‘It’s a common problem for newcomers where they forget to fork projects’, so I took this chance and explained concepts of Forking, Branching, Merge Requests, Cloning, etc which can give them a boost towards submitting their first patch 🙂

In the workshop I also took a chance to make students aware about programs like GSOC, GNOME coding education challenge, Outreachy, etc. In the end I told them for a student FOSS not only has rewarding opportunities like internships and jobs but most importantly you get a lot of learning. When you as a student get to work with highly skilled people working as an experts in their fields the learning you will get is enormous. And for me personally the most important thing is I get to hangout with amazing folks 🙂

Sajeer contributed to GStreamer side, so he took a chance to explain newcomers on how they can contribute there. (More to follow about that in his post :p )

So in short a lot happened in newcomers workshop 😉

Thanks a lot to Felipe who kept mentoring us online and helped us from very start.

I was really nervous without having him around and this was my first ever workshop , but at last I feel good now that it went more good then I we all imagined.

I met Andre Kalpper , Kiki from Mozilla foundation, Mr. Khairul Aizat and his lovely little son, Bin Li, Haris, Franklin, Mr. Enoki , and lots of amazing people which was a really amazing and lovely experience for me. 🙂

Day 1,

This day, I attended talks but mostly talked a lot with folks in the speakers room 😉

The talk which I loved the most was on “Running linux on PS4” by Mr. Iwan S.

In the speakers room, I looted Kiki’s Mozilla swags 😂 , she is really sweet and was kind enough to share her swags with every one 🙂 , I plan to spread the swags among my local community.

The most inspiring thing which I learnt from the whole trip was Mr. Iwan’s story. My eyes still shine like a baby’s eyes listening what he achieved and how well he’s ready to share back to community.

Mr. Iwan is sponsor from http://sepatuku.fans.co.id/ which is a local Indonesian brand having products in footwear. But to my surprise he was not just sponsor he was a speaker also. And he had a really amazing story.

He told me that he has saved 30 K USD just by adopting FOSS in his company per year in departments like designing, office suites and Operating systems. He also helped publishing one designing book for Inkscape in local language which was phenomenal.

Hearing from someone that they have saved thousands of dollars in their business in person is amazing 🤯 , but what’s super amazing is that the guy is in front of you and is giving a lot back to community not just by sponsorship but by actively participating in entire conference. Plus his humility and kindness, I am simply a fan of fans now 😌

Now I feel even more proud working for FOSS 🥳 

Mr Iwan and Me :p

During the conference I certainly made lots of friends, I mostly enjoyed hanging out with Andre and Haris, Andre also share some of his own farm grown apples back there which I would never forget, I never had such amazing apples tbh. thanks a lot for that Andre!

Haris was absolutely amazing guy, I never felt he is some guy whom I met 2 days back, instead I felt like he’s a friend from years. We talked on lots of things from community in Indonesia , his love for guitars to Him being a supreme leader :p , his family, his company, open source, ….. to him helping me figure out vegetarian options there.

Haris with his lovely daughter 😋

Day 3,

It was amazing keynotes and talks, I loved the talk by Haris and Mr. Khairul Aizat where he explained the plan to have next GNOME Asia in Malaysia 😉

For me my biggest takeaway from the conference is,

FOSS is about people, community, freedom and code. I personally really loved the people part of it. People like Haris, Jordan, Andik, Kukuh etc etc from Indonesia are simply amazing infact everyone there is so respectful, friendly, helpful, cheerful …. I just don’t have words to describe.

Hospitality of Indonesia is simply great! , FOSS community is great you will enjoy a lot lot more when you will hang around with people in person! 😇

(There is really a lot left for me to say, I just can’t cover everything up in words it was truly amazing experience for me and I see a lot of great potential and strength in FOSS community back in Indonesia! )

I would like to thank GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel. It was such a great pleasure to see everyone in person and I hope to meet everyone more and more!