IndiaFOSS 2024 — A Review
My first developer conference — and an awesome one.
Over the weekend, I attended IndiaFOSS, the annual conference to promote Free and Open Source Software, commonly known as FOSS, in India. Organized by FOSSUnited, an NGO with the same goal, I first heard of it when I registered for Frappeverse.
I emailed the team asking them if I could deliver a talk. They missed the email, but Ansh, the Community Manager, told me that IndiaFOSS offered “Diversity Scholarships”, which covered the cost of tickets, travel, and stay. It was unbelievably and uncommonly generous, and I figured it would be competitive, but I applied anyway (because that is all you should do — try).
I was accepted, and headed to Bangalore last Friday, somewhat nervous but unquestionably excited.
(For those uninitiated, FOSS refers to software that is both freely available and open for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. The concept behind FOSS is built on two main principles: open source, meaning that the source code is made openly available, allowing anybody to inspect, modify, and improve the software collaboratively — and freedom — users can run the software for any purpose, study how it works, modify it to suit their needs, and share both the original and modified versions with others.)
The Conference
Me and my roommate missed our alarms and woke up ten minutes before we were supposed to be there. So when I entered NIMHANS Convention Centre — incidentally, an aesthetic and spacious venue that you should definitely visit if you can — the first thing I saw were flocks of people. I did know that there would be over a thousand participants, but it was a little unnerving to actually see it.
There were three separate auditoriums running talks in parallel, along with workshops and booths. I assumed that the talks were the most educative, with the other two being there… for fun, for lack of a better word. Scanning through the different talks, I quickly pulled together a schedule for the day.
Impressions
The scheduling wasn’t top-notch — but it’s India, so I’m routinely used to every event being delayed by at least an hour, so this was good relative to the average. I wish I could attend some event that starts on time. Delays becoming the norm reeks of unprofessionalism, and probably contributes to the — not entirely incorrect — image of Indian organizations lacking quality.
Speaking of Indian norms, here’s an area where the conference demolished a global norm: the amount of focus on low-waste was truly impressive. We’d had emails asking us to bring our own handkerchief and water bottles, which I’d assumed to be a fairly standard 2024 plea and thus didn’t take seriously. I proceeded to forget my water bottle on the first day, and had a rather rude surprise when there were actually no water bottles or paper tissues at the conference. All cutlery was in metal or glass. Throughout the two days, the hosts, on stage, repeatedly urged the audience to segregate waste. It was incredibly nice to see.
I arrived an hour before the talks had started and had already started enjoying myself before the first talk. I was beginning to think what I would come to believe in the next 48 hours: dev conferences were less about the conference bit and more about the dev bit. Walking around in a room with fellow programmers, discussing this framework and that language, felt awesome. I often lost the flow of talk: these were mostly professionals and CS majors, while I was a 12th grader with no formal CS education. Even that was enthralling — I kept learning about areas of CS I didn’t even know existed, or some that were so arcane that meeting somebody from the field was mind-boggling. I had long conversations with a compiler writer, chip designer, and tech policy writer.
The diversity of the crowd also took me pleasantly by surprise. The gender and age balance, while far from ideal, was higher than I anticipated. There were even a couple other high schoolers. A large number of people supported religious icons. On the flip side, there were very few people who were not tech majors, and there seemed to be a strong concentration in location — the South was very prominent for its population, and some cities, like Chennai and Kochi, had dozens of participants present. Of course, as is expected with English conferences, rural participation was quite low — a much harder problem than the rest, and one that I have no idea how to tackle.
Booths
Back to the logistics of the conference itself, then. I would go on to mostly ignore the schedule — I enjoyed the booths far more. I learned about very niche products and organizations, had extended discussions with people around there, and had the opportunity to win a lot of swag.
The booths were really fun, almost every one of them. I spoke with some people at Taskhashila Institute and even got an interesting book. There was this 10-year-old girl who had a booth showcasing the whistles and toys she built using a 3D printer their family had built at home. I explored a multitude of cool FOSS competitors to bit-shots like Google Photos, Postman, and even Chrome.
A couple of times, what I talked with people was entirely unrelated to the content of their booth. I had a fascinating and long conversation with a lawyer on the law as a career — he was running a booth on improving the community in FOSS.
That said, some of the talks — I’d estimate around 20% — were thought-provoking, well-delivered, and overall awesome.
Talks
The first talk of the conference was given by Vishnu Mohandas, the developer of Ente Photos. Genuine, funny, and valuable, Vishnu shared a lot of ideas on building consumer products that are FOSS. For context, almost all consumer products — products that are used by normal people — are either paid or use your data to make you pay (think Google and Meta). Either way, their code is “closed” — you can’t access it. If you develop a FOSS product, however, not only does anybody have the right to take your product and use it for free, but they can modify it and create an entirely new product.
Most people assume that it is impossible to run a business while sticking to FOSS. Of course, Frappe (where I interned earlier this year) has been doing exactly that for 15 years, but it was great to see that they weren’t alone. Vishnu was followed by a talk on earning as a FOSS developer, and on Day 2, a panel of developers discussed the commercialization of FOSS software. This had been a point of concern for me with FOSS — while I genuinely appreciate the great principles underlying FOSS, as a student, money remains fairly important to me. It’s now been greatly alleviated.
Professor Pankaj Jalote spoke on how we could integrate FOSS into software engineering education in the country’s colleges. As an IIT alum and former IIT professor, it was heartening to hear the Professor’s practical and very detailed ideas. One of my long-held pet peeves is the lack of practical application in our education. It’s easy to criticize, but much harder to implement — and this Professor has done precisely that.
At probably the most mind-blowing point in the speech, the Professor says that he encourages his students to use LLMs in any aspect of their project. I wanted to talk more with him, but regretfully couldn’t find him later. That’s something I hope IndiaFOSS can do next year — have a “speakers’ section”, which could be either a time and/or a physical space where we could have some informal Q&A time with the speakers.
At a point in the Q&A, I realized that this person was famous — he was the author of an SE textbook used by colleges nationwide. Moments like these were common — I’d talk with somebody, Google them, and realize that these were hot shots. What’s so inspiring is how I’d have never realized if I hadn’t researched — these people were humble, friendly, and spent an inordinate amount of time talking to random people like me. I probably spent an hour with a guy who had sued the West Bengal Government over an internet shutdown and won, marking the only time in Indian history a court reversed an internet shutdown; multiple founders and CEOs of organizations I’d heard about, with awe, online; and Zerodha’s CTO Kailash Nadh, referred to as “the Shah Rukh Khan of Indian tech”, who nonetheless insisted I call him Kailash — “Mr. Nadh is just weird”.
There was a frightening talk on how biometric data is being systematically abused by the state, and another one on the state of our justice system.
Day 2 opened with a mind-blowing speech titled “Passion, Python and Proprietar”. Delivered by Harsh Nisar, he talked about his experience having solved dozens of problems for the government using insanely innovative solutions with AI. I couldn’t help but gape — and people around me had similar reactions — every time he changed a slide, throwing in some new bomb shell.
A couple other things
That fish-out-water feeling that I had so acutely at the beginning quickly disappeared. I then spent an unnecessary amount of Sunday thinking that I can’t imagine returning to the monotony of school the next day after all this glamour.
The team is remarkably kind. I’m noting that I’m saying this about almost many of my new interactions recently — which leads me to thinking that I perhaps have a very negative view of the human race, leading me to be constantly surprised by what might be routine kindness. Philosophy aside, the team was awesome. As I was traveling alone, they reached out to volunteers and paired me with them. They included me in almost everything and tried their best to ensure I had a great time, which I did.
The crowd management was mostly done well, except for Day 1’s breakfast — which quite a few people, myself included, couldn’t have because of how large the queue was. And oh, the food was awesome.
Due to juggling here and there and the the schedule not being followed, I missed the beginnings of many talks — notifications of some kind, or at least prominent public displays, might be a good idea.
I’m long been interested in both technology/CS and public policy/law. I’ve been avoiding making a choice for years, but as I wrap up high school in a couple months, I’ve been acutely aware of the uncomfortable fact that I have to make a decision.
At IndiaFOSS, there were so many booths dedicated purely to tech policy. Many of my most interesting conversations and valuable connections happened here. I met with the founders of Tattle, a brilliant company that uses technology to combat misinformation and hate online. I spoke with members of the Internet Freedom Foundation (including the guy who sued West Bengal from above). Apart from this, a constant theme was the idea of contributing to society — sometimes indirectly, like solving problems, but often very directly with issues I want to work on, issues that very directly hit society — education, public infrastructure, health, and others.
IndiaFOSS destroyed this notion of a binary choice between the two. Honestly, this conference would have been worth it just for that.
Last week, a friend asked what developer conferences were about and why I was attending. I told them that they were probably quite boring and filled with talks, and that I was going just because I’m interested in FOSS; to try out and experience a conference; and to meet and talk with other programmers.
To last Tuesday’s Safwan: boring?
Anything but.
