Meetups-and-Talks
FOSS CHENNAI 2.0
These are my musings from #ChennaiFOSS2024, I had a great time there learning about new FOSS technologies and how one can contribute or atleast being a part of it and spread awareness. So thought of sharing my learnings from each of the talks attended there.
Ansh Arora
Strengthening India’s FOSS Community
The session was started by Ansh on how’s and what’s of foss and also @FOSSUnited as a foundation (its mission and goals). Also in terms of stats he showed how @FOSSUnited in a small span of time achieved lot in spread of open source culture.
Ansh also mentioned Eric S Raymond’s Cathedral and Bazar (Book on opensource culture).
He explained the cathedral and bazar models in coherence with opensource culture and Linus Law.
Linus Law
Given enough eyeballs , bugs become shallow If you wanna read more about this refer this
Saaruka Devi
Unlocking Savings & Solutions: Your Journey to FOSS Alternatives
Sarukaa talked about how @fr8ian was able to rebuild their architechure using FOSS products.She mentioned about the struggle they were having but instead of buying ,building through FOSS helped @fr8ian optimise better.
She also elaborated on how @fr8ian was able to save more with FOSS tools.
Sai Poruri Rahul
Let’s talk about Software Patents
Rahul spoke about Software Patents
I really liked this talk very much not only due to my novelty but also the importance of the topic that was discussed. Rahul illustrated how the patents with broad definition can be used by the companies to gain a leverage over other companies and thus their should be hard regulatory measures in place before the providance of software patents or they mustn’t be provided.
Rahul also gave take home assignment depicted in the image below
Shree Kumar
THEJAS32 - the Sarkari SoC
Shree kumar spoke about THEJAS32 a processor which in commonplace terms he mentioned as sarkari SOC because of its non-usability in bigger picture. But according to him if this device which is quite cheap (Rs. 289) is utilised for learning purpose,it would have a great impact on the hardware open-source community.
Related Links
He is also working on a personal project which would enhance it further.
Sundara Raman Narayanan
Enhancing Analytical Efficiency in Stock Market Analysis: A Comparative Case Study
Sundara talked about the advantages of using DuckDB over Pandas.
He also informed about the FOSS alteratives of Pandas which help induce the same functionality without much need to change in the code too. Two such FOSS alternatives are :
Question I asked: Why DuckDB when other FOSS alteratives for data processing like Hadoop exists. Answer : Duck DB does it all locally and requires less memory which is not possible in case of hadoop.
Difference b/w pandas and duckdb is as follows
Sudha Parimala and Kaustubh M
OCAML workshop
In this workshop guided by Sudha she utilised a small library called Ocaml-Joy to break to us the magical powers of the language ocaml in creative coding. She utilised the functions present in the language to do the following tasks
- Draw shapes
- Rotations and translation of shapes
- Repeatitions of shapes
She also showed a example that is great for motivation as to what can be achieved through this library.
Sonali Srivastava
Know Your Hard: Automate image security scan with Kyverno & Trivy
Sonali explained the importance of security for images in kubernetes clusters and how creating policies give us granular access control over the images in the cluster.
Sonali illustrated these using a hello world program with one signed image and another unsigned one.
She showed every step from creation of policy using Kyverno to signing the images by use of Cosign and then verifying the access control in the end by testing the access of signed vs unsigned images.
She also used a tool called trivy to scan the images for security vulnerabilities.
Balu Babu
Building Open Hardware with FOSS
Well this was an interesting talk. This included everything from enthusiasm towards tech and also the creativity for building things.
He started the talk by explaining how its so easy to start simple things and build simple things using hardware by just understanding the foundations.
Balu was so keen to showing how he solved the problem of custom key-bindings by creating the entirely open-source QMK-compatible 3x3 mechanical macropad which is easily configurable if you are able to code in C-programming.
He delved entirely while showing how he basically design the boards, create PCB for them using Kicad and then 3-D prints them.
He also shared the process of slicing using PrusaSlicer which done before 3-D printing the board.
Vignesh
Protecting digital rights and privacy using free software
Vignesh highlighted the Internet revolution,emphasizing its origin as a decentralized network and its current shift towards centralization.Moreover he spoke about the privacy concerns we face in today’s world in usage of free softwares. He also raised his concern on the topic that many apps can be free but not open-source so one should be aware about what tools one uses as they might hamper their privacy to a great level. Vignesh also conveyed some tools that can be utilised in your workflow such UBlock origin and also other opensource apps like NewPipe.
Vinay Kumar C
Self-hosting FOSS and Profitability: Zerodha’s Story
Vinay Kumar explained how a big firm like Zerodha has always been a wide supporter of open-source tools and most of the workflows in Zerodha involve usage of opensource tools only.
He also explained how zerodha strategically mitigated the risks of vendor lock-ins and scaled in a better and cost-effective way using the open-source tools instead of managed services and tools.
The list of open-source tools used by Zerodha are mentioned here.
Nikhil Kothari
This talk was on point and really informative regarding optimisations. Many people who are in beginning of the optimisations in their projects both companies as well as self-builders can learn from The Commit Company process of optimising their product
Nikhil introduced how Raven built on top of Frappe framework which was once less optimised , was able to improve by intense observation and following out a three step process which focus on performance by default.
- Always cache both frontend and backend
- Load what’s absolutely is needed.
- Use what’s absolutely needed.
- Write unit tests for performance analysis.
Nikhil inspired by these quotes by Vinay Kumar C from Zerodha focussed on the things that were small but causing big changes in terms of customer usability.
Nikhil first analysed the bundle size of the entire project and checked out the dependencies that were just used in haste to implement the functionality but are no longer needed and can be implemented in custom way to reduce bundle size. (Use what’s needed)
Second problem Nikhil was facing was heavy components and less customizability of UI library so they switched to tailwind for most of their components.(Use what’s needed)
Thirdly they solved the issue of mork overhead on loading the components in the run time by lazy loading some components and pages. (Load what’s needed)
They resolved a issue on a specific message rendering problem which they were facing using the following strategy.
Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal
Bridging the database divide
This talk was relatively short but intuitive as well the author had great communication skills. The idea was described very nicely in short span of time.
Pavish basically talked about Mathesar , a tool that would help both technical as well as non-technical crowd to makeshift from excel to PostgresSQL without much cognitive overload.
The problem was that technical people can and do interact with PostgresSQL or any other Database on daily usecase.
But the non-technical crowd although much efficient in their work not knowing the lingo are confused as to how to work with databases.
Mathesar removes this barrier first through clear cut descriptions of each terminologies without hiding the details of Postgres to the non-technical crowd and also have a intuitive U.I that looks similar to Excel.
The advantages of this would be :
- The non-technical people can use the power of Database without much help required.
- Data analysis could be done easily with an easy to use interface.
Why to sell FOSS and HOW
- The end session was a discussion among few of the people above regarding the difficulties they are facing while developing a FOSS product , how they solve their problems , what are the usecases they would be dealing with in future and also how they are thinking of monetizing the product if they do.
- Things also discussed were how one can break into FOSS and how should one deal with burnouts
I really liked the idea of Nikhil regarding this that one should firstly focus on building things instead of breaking into FOSS instead to be ready for FOSS first even before creating your own project would definitely give you skills required for it.
Last moments and GoodByes
At the end few five minute speakers introduced their own projects and illustrated the usage.
After this FOSS chennai came to an end with a note of thanks from Hari Prasanth S
At the end I would like to thanks @FOSSUnited for a good session looking forward to participate more if got a chance in future too.
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