The main target of the workshop was to show/teach the basics of the python programming language. I hear mostly students asking “How to start working on a project?” but as the learning curve is not so easy in most of the things, they run away. The only students we have from India who are contributing to any FOSS projects are the people who came in their own interest. I found programming with python can be an easy entry point for the general students and they can become better programmer in life. This is the main reason behind my python workshops in different places.

No need to buy books, great online community, projects working on different dimensions, all of these can generate interest in the students.

Coming back to my workshop, I generally try to follow my own book (which I have to update). Slowly going through simple examples and showing that it is not difficult. I ask the students to solve the lab works they do in any programming lab in python. This will help them to understand the basics of the language. The workshop lab was supposed to have 30 students, but many more came so I had to ask them to seat in groups in the computers (most of them was running Fedora ). The basic feedback I got, states that it was easy, but how the students are going to use this, I have no clue. Btw, most of the students in my workshop were from Pune University Maths department, I told them to attend Ramki’s workshop in the second half as his workshop was about explaining how to solve mathematical problems.

At the end of the workshop I showed few applications written in python and talked about job opportunity in market. 2 students contacted me after the event.

Full set of the event photos can be found here.

Coming month, I will be in Durgapur, doing another python workshop , I will also conduct a Django workshop.

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The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8

This was taken in March in the colorful festival known as “Holi” . I played holi after 5 years. The kids from the society building already started by the time I came down with my camera. I was really tensed about the camera as they were throwing colors in all directions. Withing few minutes, putting the colors in the fountain and using it as a big tank full of colors became the main attraction for them.

The idea for this meme came from sankarshan.

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On the first day we took charge of the Fedora booth. Kital, Heimanshu sat on the table, /me and Sayamindu sat on the ground behind the table and started discussing many things. Next table was full with KDE-IN team with many swags. Day 1 I spent mostly meeting old friends and talking. It was nice to meet Kital once again

I managed to find Girish Ramakrishnan in a table in the first floor. So asked for his help to have a long waiting feature in pony. I wanted to view images with a semi-transparent background just like picasa does in windows systems. While working on it Prashanth Udupa also joined and helped to visualize what I was trying to achieve. Finally it was done with 2 lines of code

I also had a plan to sit with Sayam and discuss two of projects , Jukebox and Lekhonee. Got couple of unknown areas cleared in sugar activities. In lekhonee-gnome I tried to have a WYSIWYG editor using gtkwebkit and later also tried libabiword. This work is not completed yet. Will see which one comes out better.

Meanwhile 2nd day of the event was Fedora Project of the day. Mether, Kiltal, Kedar, /me, Shrink, Susmit, Ankur, Heimanshu many others were there. I gave a talk on python-newt module and tried to show how easy to use that while developing console based applications.

This year was again special as Milosch and Brita came again to FOSS.IN. Russ Nelson also joined along with his talk on arduino boards. /Me and Sayam bought two boards from a Bangalore based firm in the same day. Milosch gave an inspirational talk on how one should start working hardware based projects. He bought me couple of cool gifts so that I can start working of my own. He and Russ had great workshop on 8 bit and 32 bit (OpenBeacon) small computers. I spent the last two days of the event with them only learning small small things. One of the biggest outcome of the event is computerclub.in (not ready yet), a group to work on hardware-software related stuffs. We have our initial mailing list and sf.net project created. Please join if you are interested. The Bangalore group already fixed their first physical meeting.

The event ended with a great performance trdp. Enjoyed the show too much, never took out my camera

All shots can be found here.

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While it is off

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The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8