Mozcafe - An event organized

Its been a long time since I last saw you people. I was suffering through a writer's block both on my blog and the book I have been working upon. However, an event happened recently that made me get out of the block. So, let me tell you what led to this.

On 23rd February of 2014, we worked on a method to introduce the people of Allahabad to the wonders of open source. A seminar was organized for the event at IIIT Allahabad. The Mozilla foundation helped us along the way, by the way of goodies to be distributed and the budget to be used. So, I send my thanks to them for helping us make the event a great success. Without them, we would still be looking for sponsors, and what-not.

The idea was implanted in our minds after a few from our college went to the Kitchenmaker event in Allahabad hosted by ReMo Shahid. Already a lot of people from our college had registered to be FSA's at Mozilla Foundation, so we got together to find the future course for the college open source culture. A club was formed there and the general course decided.

The first mark to cross off on our list was the Mozcafe event, which we had decided to host in February. After getting permission from the college authorities and Gymkhana, the auditorium was assigned to us for 23rd. There were many practice sessions going on and I have to thank another of our clubs, the ALC Club for hanging with us through the thick of times and not getting frustrated with the long hours they had to put in too due to us.

Lo and behold, the time was upon us, it was 23rd February. Let me tell you, when you are working hard trying to achieve the best possible, that's the moment you feel true ecstasy. We had to go to take the food from a vendor before the event. Thankfully, the order had already been placed, so being a geek I can say in algorithmic terms it took the time complexity of O(1) rather than O(n).

Then the gunshot was heard, and the event started off. First up was Shahid presenting a start to the wonderment of open source and let me tell you, was it invigorating!!! Various goodies were distributed to participating people, and volunteers were running here and there to give mic to the person who wanted to answer. In all, it was a merry time. Next it was upto Charul to tell us about the process for applying to the prestigious GSoC program, that had many of us thinking about certain projects to make for the future, and how to get selected in it.

With the changing market that is the smartphone business, open source is the leading Operating System contributor. Mozilla doesn't want to be left so far behind in the race that it won’t be able to catch up. Therefore, with the launch of Firefox OS, it is taking a step in the right direction. Though far from perfect, it is a good platform to work upon and develop stuff. To impart us with the knowledge about the working of the OS, and tell a DIY about the getting the OS, Jatin was welcomed onto the stage.

However, it would all have been incomplete, without the talk of Aditya and Rahul, who were to tell us about version control, and how to contribute to the various projects that are continuously being worked upon throughout the world. GitHub, the leading social network for developers to contribute to the same project has helped since its inception to bring a project under a common roof. Though not to forget other leading ones such as Mercurial and SVN, but they are more corporate level works, than the open source of the world.

Now to learn blogging like this, and how to get the maximum views on your blog, people were treated to a feast on blogging by Ankit. SEO and other such terms that we have heard about, but never learnt how to use were unraveled in his talk.

Finally ideas were collected from the people about how they want to contribute to the world and an Idea Board was formed from it, and was it cool. Some ideas were so good, some trolls were included in that made us laugh right off the bat. Finally two of the best were selected and goodies were given to them. Also, some people came up on the stage to share their personal experience of the event. It was quite humbling to say the least.

And here I take leave. Take a moment to see the video below, and relive the moments with us of the day gone by, but etched in our memory like it was yesterday.