This is actually filled with short stories about People whom I worked with, what I learned from them. It is about community projects from where I gained experience. Please feel free to interrupt me if you have any question.

Everything started because of one person, showed me how to start contributing, started with Bengali translation for KDE in Ankur bangla group. First person to tell me that I should contribute (never knew that word in this context before) upstream. Tell what is upstream and what is contribution

Tell the story on why people thought I am a linux expert as I knew how to mount and how to play mp3 using xmms-mp3 rpm.

My first talk, dgplug: A year around the sun. Met most of the community for the first time.

How I wanted to code for my Nokia 7710 and He said I should try Python, many months later Nokia confirmed Python will only work on series60 phones, not on my series90 one :(

was given a perl script, never managed to understand head or tail, no one in the company did, (tell the one week story), instead wrote a parser in python and generated the outpur as required. My second code was to create proper input files for koha from another format.

When sankarshan asked me to read the source, at first it does not make sense in mind but with time it taught a lot.

One of the best programmer in the world, every time I went to his house I though I will learn something that night but I slept and he worked till late night :) Learned that one can go to any distance while being in India. Also understood why system level knowledge is important.

Someone I can look upto.

He was a better programmer than most of us, more vocal about the issues and more enthusiastic than any college student in current days. Can you guess the name?

Kenneth Gonsalves, or lawgon.

Elder brother, mentor, Manager :) I spent 2 days to write a smtp server, he asked me to seat beside him and in next hour or so, we had some beautiful code drawn, along with tests.

How many people here know about Makefiles? About autotools? Back in 2007 I had only basic ideas about Makesfiles, I was working on OpenPCD project, which is 13.56Mhz RFID device, a complete openhardware and open software. I was trying to write Python binding for the C library. I was awake whole night and at 6am showed the Makefile to Milosch. He initial reaction was "Kushal, even my grandmom can write better makefile than this. You should jump from the window". I was in fifth floor in case any one is wondering. That incident made sure that I learn more about Linux build systems and in future I used autotools in many more projects, I had to develop Python extensions for many C libraries for my RH work.

Learn yourself and teach others.

How to contribute to a project which was born few hours back by a developer in the other side of the world.

Many upstream contributors all around, most hallways talks are full with new technical information. Ramky, Rahul, Parag, Aman Alam and many more.

Sayamindu asked me if I can start working on the project and make sure that it becomes part of the standard OLPC release. It taught me many things, following release cycles, suddenly thousands of young kids using the app the way I never thought about. Writing code for 10 people is easy but when 50k people are suddenly using your code, you will be in pressure.

Talk about the team, why thinking in ahead for the future support to the application is important. Working in RH and also in Fedora will teach you how to work in boundaries, before you start using random dependencies you will think about the next 7 years of support to it.

I had only 4GB ram and it was not enough for me to compile PyPY. I was asked to look into CPython instead.

To handle import exceptions in help()

Glibc upstream developer, used to have hallway chats everyday while in RH office, photography and computer. He did a lot of push so that I keep committing to the upstream.

Yes, it is you all, discussing a lot about Python, learning about new projects, meeting upstream CPython Core devels for the first time.

Make sure that you attend this event if you are going to PyCOn US or EuroPython. All developers at the same place and hacking on all the projects you can think about.

We had a problem with hg (mercurial). No one managed to tell the right answer but from the next table where all the mercurial developers were working on mercurial, Matt Mackall (lead developer of mercurial) came to our table and helped to fix the issue. This level is not possible in any other conferences. I received my commit access in this year's PyCon, Micheal and R. David Murray

why trust of other developers is really important.

These days students are only looking at short term benefits. contributing to upstream projects will help you in long run, even in your office career. Keep doing the hard work. It always pays off. one of the best parts of open source is that "capable, enthusiastic, and easy to work with are valuable traits in building a network of advocates :) which means you end up with a bunch of folks that are capable, enthusiastic and easy to work with all helping each succeed :)