Wednesday, May 27, 2015

OSDC Nordic 2015

After I finished the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) or now is known as Outreachy program in August 2014, I moved to Germany to study my master degree.  I was busy with my first semester of study, so unfortunately that I didn't have much time to do coding or participate in any Open Source or Perl community event. Now, I sorted everything out and I'm full of energy to actively contribute to Open Source community again. I looked for a conference to update new technology about Perl and other Open Source projects and it will be a good chance to get to know new local community which closes to me.

I decided to attend the Open Source Developers' Conference(OSDC) Nordic 2015 which was held on May 8-10th, 2015 in Oslo, Norway. This is the first time that OSDC conference was held in a Nordic country. Some people asked me why I chose to to come to Norway for this conference and I have many reasons that I think I shouldn't miss this conference which are ...

  • This conference was organized by Oslo Perl Mongers and Nordic Perl Workshop was included to be a part of this conference.
  • Since this is ODSC conference, so there're a lot of sessions from other Open Source groups of technology which I can attend. This is a good chance for me to learn the new technology from people on that community that I never experienced before.
  • All of the talks in the event are in English.
  • Oslo isn't far from my residence so I don't have to travel for a long time because I still class every week.
My one of my impression for this conference is not only I can get promotion code as a student but also anyone can ask for promotion code if they are actively member of any Open Source community. This is really kind of the organizers!

OSDC.no Day 1 : Pre conference/ A panel debate

I arrived Oslo in the afternoon, after had a little city sight-seeing I headed to the bar for the pre conference. I was so happy to see Abigail -- a friend from a Perl community, last time we met each other at YAPC::Asia in Tokyo and we meet again in another conference in another part of the world. This is one of reasons why I like a conference -- this is an event to bring people who have the same interests from around the world together. 


There was a panel debate by Simon Phipps(of OSI fame), Patrick Michaud(Perl 6 language designer), Mark Burgess(Creator of Cfengine) and Christer Gundersen(Open Source evangelist) all of them have been working on Open Source firms for decades with a lot of experience. They had debate, discussion and answer questions about the world of Open Source like what are key factors of successful or failed Open Source project,  how a company contributes Open Source and about Open Source community and more. I was a bit tired from a long journey since early morning but the topic of discuss and the relaxed environment at the bar made it be joyful evening. 


OSDC.no Day 2

Started the day by Norwegian coffee and a lot of fruit, I think this is kind of Norwegian culture to server these things for guests.

After the conference opening by Salve, the was the very interesting talk on the main hall about Open Source in the topic Open Source and Flexibility. The very good thing that it happened in the main hall without any other talks in other halls. After the first talk, it was the hard part of the conference which is choosing the room from for talks from each community. There were 3 rooms divided by group of technologies which are:
  • The main hall for topics about about Open Source and other small groups of technology
  • Nordic Perl Workshop room 
  • Civic Hacking room

As a Perl Hacker my first interest is always about Perl, so I wanted to attended the Nordic Perl Workshop room but I was a bit hesitate because the talks from other group of technology are also interesting for me. After check the list of the talks on that day. I decided to attend only the Perl room since there were a lot of topics that I couldn't bear missing them. There were 4 talks on that day and I attended all of them. I like all of the talks even though some of them are a bit hard to understand for me because I never had much chance to use that method in practical way like Perl 6 and others and  I learn a lot of new technology from those talks. 

OSDC.no Day 3

The first talk of me and the conference was a talk about Open Source development by Patrick Michaud and then we moved the room of one's area of interest. That day, I thought I would like to try to learn new things from technology community then decided to join the main hall with topic about Frida, a dynamic code instrumentation toolkit made in Norway. It was the first time that I heard about that and it let me know know how far it goes in the world of Open Source. I had some free time when a talk finished earlier and then I had a chance to talk with Salve in person about his experience in organizing the conference. We shared experience about how to organize the conference and what is the idea of starting OSDC in Oslo and obstacles of it. It recalled me about when we set up Bangkok.pm meet up. It was the first time meet up we couldn't expect much about number of participants we just wanted to show that we could do that and urge more people to join. In the afternoon, I join the sessions about general topics in Open Source in the main hall. I specially like one talk in the topic Teach Kids Code, I like the idea to teach kids how to programming since they are young because I like programing and I wish to see more and more generations in the cyberspace and innovate new things for the world.

Finally, we came to the end of the conference, everyone was in the main hall there were some light talks. The conference is closed simply by Salve and thank you stuffs for hard working.


My accomplishment and motivation

From this conference, I have learned not only Perl programming technology but also other Open Source technologies. I got to know more people from other Open Source communities. I realized myself that I shouldn't stick with just one technology of community but I can join other group because people in the world of Open Source they are also nice and welcome new member. I have learned how to develop both the software itself as well as the community in the same time. I got some more idea in the way to improve my ability to contribute to FOSS, I should have more communication with local community here, take a part in community event or help to organize sometime I found that there're so many people who are looking to join an event but the problem that we still have few people to volunteer to organize the event. If I can't be an organizer then whenever I attend the event I should try to be a speaker. This time at OSDC, I also wanted to give the talk but since I didn't do much coding then I'm a bit lost from new technology and also busy with study, so I didn't have much interesting thing to share.  Next time I should be more prepared and give some talks to share something about my currently work which I just started recently. Hopefully, I can make it happens in the future very soon.

Group Photo by: Wendy