Rahul gives unsolicited advice

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 -...

In the first few years of college, I was heavily involved in organising student communities. I helped organize the Astronomy Club at IIT Madras for the first four years of my college life, among other communities that I was a part of. But I stopped after my fourth year. After graduating, I got interested in being a part of software communities in the cities I was working out of but I never helped organize the communities. Pune, Chennai, Austin, Cambridge. Local meetups, PyCon India, SciPy India. I attended a few meetups at each of these places, maybe gave a talk or two, but I never helped organize the actual communities. I briefly volunteered to help organize a few meetups but I soon realized the additional work and my effort trailed off pretty quickly. Things finally changed. I helped organize the HydFOSS software conference at T-Hub on Saturday (29 July, 2023) and I am incredibly proud of what we have been able to achieve. 150+ people attended the conference. We invited 3 speakers f...

There's a lot to unpack in the title. Let's start with FOSS United . FOSS United is an Indian non-profit "dedicated to the cause of building Free and Open Source (FOSS) projects and communities in India". As part of building FOSS communities in India, they host a monthly meetup in Bengaluru  which I started attending in December 2022. In the January 2023 meetup, I gave a talk on the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 . For the February 2023 meetup, I proposed a talk on Scientific computing because everyone I met in the Dec 2022 and Jan 2023 meetups didn't know what a "Scientific Software Developer" does. The proposal was rejected but the organizers reached out to me and asked me if I was interested in being part of a panel discussion on "The State of FOSS" in India. I enthusiastically agreed, the panel had an internal meeting to prep for the discussion and the moderator came up with a set of questions. The panel discussion happened thi...

In a previous post , I wrote about 8 things a government can do about FOSS where I talked about categorizing the governments actions in 8 distinct ways. From what I've been reading online, it looks like the Indian Government is already trying to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) FOSS. To recap, DIY-ing is the very last option in the "8 things" and it's risky. Especially in the case of FOSS, DIY is risky. Given the scale of government operations, any DIY solution that the government comes up with gain widespread usage, which can then lead to inertia. Remember that DIY-ing requires not just building expertise in FOSS but also continually maintaining it. If the Indian government doesn't maintain the necessary expertise, it risks the FOSS project falling behind the curve. Let's look at the Samarth eGov project as an example of the Indian government DIY-ing FOSS. Samarth project aims at creating an Open Source, Open Standard enabled Robust, Secure, Scalable and Evolutionary Pr...

The title is chock full of jargon. Let me break it down. API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is the user-facing part of a software package. For example, if you use the "numpy" package, "numpy.array" is an API. And APIs need to be documented. A single API can produce different results depending on the inputs so documenting the full capabilities of an API is important. Jupyter Book  is a new tool in the Scientific Python community to create and upload documentation easily. The community as a whole seems to be working towards better documenting their projects and some have chosen to go with Jupyter Book instead of relying on Sphinx. I personally don't know why the community felt the need to move away from vanilla rst ( reStructureText ) and Sphinx . One of the advantages of Sphinx is the fact that API documentation for the package can be created automatically (using sphinx-apidoc ) and the API docs can be included in the user-facing documentati...

I've been thinking about Product Management in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for a while now and I just spent most of my morning reading up on it. Here are a few good articles I came across :  Why Product Management is Open Source’s Fatal Flaw - An interesting article (from 2008!) that used an example from the Pidgin FOSS IM Client (I've heard about this in college) to discuss where Product Managers fit into FOSS projects and why there is a need for more Product Management in FOSS. No Such a Thing as Open Source Product Manager - Here's an article from 2005 that questions whether or not Product Managers add value to the underlying product. The anecdote about a FOSS competitor beating out software from Microsoft (where Product/Project Managers are involved) feels like an outlier rather than the norm. Rules for product managers at open source companies - Here is a more recent article from 2020 that tries to layout exactly where Product Management can help an open s...