Planet SoC

Hello guys,
I am glad to inform about the successful hackathon we had in India during the last weekend. Apologies for the late report as there was a last exam bugging me.

The hackathon was mainly hosted by Geodesic office at Bangalore and sponsored by FOSS.IN. I am really thankful to Atul Chitnis and Shreyas for providing us with an excellent workspace to hack on. The arrangements rocked!

The hackathon involved Pradeepto(kdepim), Sharan(kexi), Tejas(kopete), Akarsh(kstars), Shashank(panoramio/marble), and me(umbrello).

Day 1:
We started of pretty well. Tejas was kind enough to drop us to the workspace ( I cannot forget the number of U-turns we took to find pradeepto :D ). We met for lunch at about 1:30 pm and started off with introduction chat. Kushal joined us as well. Kushal being camera ninja, took a few pics of us but unfortunately we couldn’t have him further as he had to leave for Pune.

After a few moments, we started of with building stuff. All the soc students - me, Akarsh and Shashank were using the desktops set up over there and the rest of them were updating the kde sources on their notebooks.
Shreyas started adding some fun, by twittering the tidbits of what we were talking and doing. Pradeepto being smart to utilize build time, held a discussion about foss.in topics related to kde amongst us.

At about 5 pm, everyone had kde svn running and by then Tejas had taken the lead with the first commit of the hackathon - bonjour to knetwork/kopete which is likely to be released with KDE 4.2. Pradeepto then made a release of kdepim called ‘Monsoon in Bangalore’. I ported the BoxWidget to set of framework classes I had written. Shashank was working on his cool Panoramio support to Marble. Then we had a nice dinner in Nandini restaurant and probably Akarsh was the only person to hack even during the night :P (others were tired of travel)

Day 2
This was quite productive day. Codewise there were bug fixes by Tejas, Akarsh, Sharan(helped Tejas) and me porting a few UML digrams widgets to the GV framework. Shashank continued his hack on the Panoramio support with download queue to Panoramio JavaScriptObjectNotation.

But the best part was, knowledge transfer that happened during the day. ab85602c80c8412eabc16e6de31d33de

Also during the tea break, we discussed on how FOSS can be imbibed in the people. We discussed various positive effects of FOSS and how many people have been benefited by it. The FOSS stories inspired me and I guess others as well!

Day 3
I couldn’t attend this day, as I had to study for the *postponed* exam :-(
So you can read Akarsh’s blog about day 3.
Well I could make a couple of commits from home which fixed some bugs in my previous commits, did a few merges as well. Here a screenshot depicting the work done by me during hackathon.

Overall I am really happy to be part of such a nice event. This was my first ever foss event and I learnt about foss in more detail. The attendees are my first ever FOSS friends :-) Infact a better word for the event is FOSSathon!

So thank you folks for such an awesome event. I thank Atul once again for sponsoring us and making this event a grand success!!
Yay!