A big thank you to Farhaan Bukhsh, who’s been kind and generous enough to let me steal his work and his words

Day 0

“This is awesome! This is so awesome!”, these were was my reactions as I boarded my first flight to Delhi.

I was having trouble finding proper accommodation.
Kushal, Sayan and Chandan helped me a lot there.
I finally got the honour of  bunking with Sayan, Subho and Rtnpro. This made for an unforgettable experience!
I landed and directly went to JNU convention center. I met the whole  Red Hat intern gang. It was so much fun meeting them all.
I had proposed Pagure for the Dev Sprints and I roped in Vivek as collaborator and partner in crime.

Imagine my metal agony and tension when the sprint started and there was no sign of Vivek or Saptak. Saptak is a FOSSASIA contributor and Vivek  contributes to Pagure with me.
Finally it was my turn to talk about Pagure on stage. It was all the things I feared. It was nerve wrackingly terrifying.
And yet … it was beautiful!
The experience and the energy gave me a new high and made me confident.
We got a lot of young and new contributors, and we tried to guide them and make them send at least one PR.  One of them persisted and made actually made a PR which got readily merged.

I met lots of other contributors and mentors!
Everything sounded fun! Each and every project was simply amazing.
I wished I could contribute to and help all of them.
We also met Paul, who writes code for PyCharm, and had an animated discussion over Vim v/s PyCharm.

Finally the day ended with us, (Vivek, Sayan, Subho, Saptak and me) going out to dinner. I bunked with Sayan and Subho and we hacked all night long. I was configuring my Weechat and was trying all the plugins available and trust me there are a lot of them.

Day 1

I was a session chair in one of the lecture rooms and it was crazy!
From learning to write firmware for a drone, to using generators to write multi-threaded programs to working with the salt stack, it was a rich varied, mind bending experience

The food was really good but the line for food was “pythonic!”

There were a lot of stalls put up and I went to all of them chatted with the folks manning the stalls. My favorite one was PyCharm because Paul promised me to teach me some neat tricks.
The Pyladies booth was very informative and were responsible for making attendees aware about certain social issues and about getting women in tech.

We had two keynotes by Baishampayan Ghose and Van Lindberg. Both of the keynotes were so varied, yet so amazing, they made me look at technology from a different view point altogether.

One really cool part of such a conference is the Open Spaces and Lightning talks. I attended a few and I found them enthralling. I was so eagerly waiting for DGPLUG’s famous staircase meeting. I met Kushal’s mentor, Sartaj and he gave us deep insights into the whats and whys and wherefores of the importance of contributing to open source. My big takeaway from his time with us, was that even if one’s code is not used by anyone, they should still be writing code for the love of it.

After this we went out for DGPLUG/Volunteers dinner at BBQ Nation. It was quite an eventful evening ;)

Day 2 

The last day of conference, I remember having thoughts about how a programming language translates into philosophy and how that philosophy unites a diverse nation like India.
While that feeling of inclusivity was amazing, there was also a touch of sadness, the melancholy of parting from friends who meet just once a year.
I could actually now relate all IRC nicks with their faces. It brings a lot more to the table. It made them all relatable, more … human.

And at last we all returned to the humdrum of our normal lives with a promise to meet again. I still wonder at how technology creates camaraderie between people from all nooks and corners of life. At how it relates a school teacher to a product engineer. It makes  me feel that Python is more than just a programming language; it’s a unique medium that unites people and gives them power to make things right.

With this joyful thought fhackdroid signs out!

Happy Hacking!