Rahul gives unsolicited advice

Last week, I wrote that I'll be giving up to 5% of my annual salary to Free and Open Source Software , and one of the projects that I'm donating to is the TeX Users Group  (TUG). I joined TUG at the "special individual membership" tier at 50 USD  - roughly 5000 INR - per annum. The right thing to do now is to check what they're doing with my money or what they've done with funds/donations in the past. Lemme rewind a little - TUG came into my radar because I came across the TUG 2025 annual conference . I was surprised and saddened to find that it happened in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram now), Kerala, India because it's an event that we at FOSS United would have loved to support financially. I kept the TUG 2025 tab open for multiple weeks because I wanted to watch a few of the talks . Note to self : Check if anyone from India was a part of the organizing team for TUG 2025, and reach out to them. Maybe we (FOSS United) could support them in future events. ...

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has a sustainability problem. For those of you who are a part of the FOSS ecosystem, or are fairly familiar with it, Duh. But here's a short intro for the uninitiated - you are relying on Free and Open Source software when you read this blog post. Most commercial software applications are made up primarily of FOSS. Our digital lives are powered by FOSS. Yet, a majority of the people who create, maintain, and sustain the FOSS projects are underfunded, if not completely unfunded. This isn't really news - for more than a decade now, people in the FOSS community have been complaining about the sustainability problem, and people have come up with varying solutions to the problem. A real solution to the FOSS sustainability problem involves systematic support from for-profit enterprises and Nation-State Governments but for the moment, let's focus on what I can do as an individual. And why am I bringing this up now? Because of what's happene...

I put the "reviews" in quotes because it's less review-y and more comment-y. Writing is my "theme" for Q1 2025 and I'm pretty happy about the fact that I've started a new blog about the childrens' books that our lives revolve around thanks to Luffy - rahulandluffyread.blogspot.com . I've written 20 posts this month - some of the books came into our lives this month and others have been in our lives for more than an year. I realize that I'm happy writing "slice of life"-style posts instead of writing strict review-style posts. For reasons I can't describe, I was interested in writing review-y posts about books in my life but I was never able to do justice to the format. To me, a review needs additional work from me to look into critique of the book, and I barely have time to put together a blogpost, so the posts just stay in the "drafts" folder, never to be published. This is a surprising revelation to me and it only oc...

In an earlier post , I talked about wanting to create more than I consumed. I've already been writing more than I ever have publicly - but all of it has been limited to the FOSS United discourse forum . A couple of things that I am particularly proud of are the Papers We Love (FOSS edition) and the Absurd Software Patent of the Week threads which I started. The thing i'm most proud of though is the draft 2025 strategy document for FOSS United . For the first time in a long time, I'm incredibly proud of what I have been able to create. It has been a roller coaster ride since I joined the FOSS United Foundation in May 2024 and I've taken a "sit back and observe" approach for much of my time so far. I didn't want to be a bull in a china shop and negatively impact initiatives that the Foundation was already doing successfully. I chose to observe, nudge, advice, and guide instead of direct. And thankfully, I've gained sufficient understanding of the bigge...

So far, I've submitted talk proposals for three FOSS conferences. See the list of conferences and my proposals below. I'm expecting to submit a couple of more proposals for PyConf Hyderabad - a talk proposal on the GIL-ectomy (that I presented internally for a client), a talk proposal about the fossunited.org platform that we have been building at FOSS United, and a workshop proposal on the Frappe Framework that powers fossunited.org! Why am I sharing this here? Because not all of my talk proposals get accepted at conferences but that doesn't mean that the ideas or talks are useless. In fact, I've been wondering for a couple of years now that if a talk proposal gets rejected, I should just livestream the talk on my own personal YouTube channel instead of letting the idea die. This post is me taking one step in that direction. PyConf Hyderabad by HydPy community - 22-23 Feb 2025  DEVCONF India by Red Hat India - Feb 28, March 1 2025 FOSSMeet'25 by FOSS Cell NITC -...

I watched the Groundhog Day movie a couple of weeks back with my mother. It is one of my favorite movies and I was trying to get her to appreciate time-travel movies. We had watched the Edge of Tomorrow movie a week earlier and she had come to not hate it at the end. Groundhog day is one of my favorite movies but I don't think I've watched it since I watched it in college, more than a decade ago. I was a different person then and rewatching the movie made me realize something quite profound, at least to my mind. (Spoilers ahead) In the movie, the protagonist relives the same day over and over again. He goes to sleep and he wakes up on the same day instead of the next day. He goes through various stages of grief and eventually accepts his fate. This leads to an interesting transformation where he continues to relive the same day over and over again but works on improving himself. He starts to learn how to play the piano and everyday, he gets a little better. He starts reading...

I started college in 2009, when I was 17 years old. Thanks to a good enough laptop, free college internet, and an intranet that was chock full of pop culture, I consumed information like there was no tomorrow. And I'm trying to pull myself out of that mindset after 15 years. That's not to say that I haven't created anything. I started this blog when I was in college. I used to organize sessions on popular astronomy as part of the student astronomy club. Towards the latter half of my college years, I wrote small snippets of code to simulate toy physics problems. In my final year, I publicly shared the code used for my thesis work. After graduating, for the past eight years, I have been contributing to the Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem. I've fixed bugs, I've added features, I've helped with house-keeping. I've written marketing content for a product that I was working on. I've given talks on Python and the Python ecosystem. But if I have...

I am putting together a talk on FOSS Policy in India. I started DuckDuckGo-ing today morning for the relevant information and I came across a blogpost by the Open Source Observatory on the Indian Government and Open Source . Within that post, I came across the Open Source Software Country Intelligence Report on India published by the EU in 2021. I have been going through the links highlighted in that document, and the links I discovered within those links, and I swear that half of the pages are dead. Either the domains don't exist today (19 May 2024), the domains don't support HTTPS, or the pages don't exist leading to 404. The internet is dying. And I don't know what to do about it. Well, I know one thing that we can do. Especially in the case where internet links are being used in Policy Papers. Use the Wayback Machine and, if possible, financially support the Internet Archive . The Wayback Machine enables you to "save" a website in it's current state ...

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage ...

The Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India published a draft policy to support and nurtue the unique requirements of Deep Tech startups in India. I just finished reading it and put together a few comments in a FOSS United forum thread . I will probably read it again a week or so later and try to update my comments on the thread with any new insights/thoughts I have.