24 February, 2013

Day 1 @ KDE Meetup

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As you might have correctly guessed (evident from title also :P ),this post is about first day at KDE Meetup.

First word which strikes upon my mind describing this event is an "Overwhelming Response" from a huge crowd, not only from Gujarat but all-over India including Durgapur and Nainital. This was probably the first time I saw our Lecture Theatre actually flooding with no vacant spaces. (Hardly half of this during lectures :P). Having about 300 registrations and no more capacity in the houseful Lecture Theatre, wistfully, on-spot registrations after a point had to be refused.





The first speaker was +Pradeepto Bhattacharya, founder of KDE-India. It was really nice to hear that he had come to Gujarat for the first time and that also for KDE meetup. Along with his chats about the famous Gujarati  dish "dhokla", Pradeepto took us to the whole new world "KDE", the world which looked complicated to most of the audience before his talk. The interesting thing was that he marked today's event as a historical event in the history of KDE, which fascinated me. His lecture was motivational enough to inspire people to take up a fresh start in the world of software development. He started with history of KDE right from idea >> KDE1.0 >> ... >> KDE SC 4.10 >> Meetup 2013 and continued with stories of heroes like Debayan Benerjii, +Nikhil Marathe  (DA-IICTian), Vishesh Handa and many more.. which were meant to inspire and motivate people. Really it was a very good start up at KDE Meet up.


The next speaker was +Vishesh Handa , a crazy, funky, cool, open, down to earth and amazing person with an impressive personality. He looked very enthusiastic guy, quite willing to share his knowledge. He introduced us to Qt- where it is used, what it does and why we need it. And proceeded with demos for basic features like layouts, widgets, event loop and model/view. Qt is really too Cute.. :P Participants started throwing questions and looking at the zeal and zest of audience, they started giving goodies- a cool KDE-India T-shirt. He had to add, "Ask questions not because we have too much to offer :P". This session was highly engrossing and gripped the audience so-well that the slot alloted for Plasma Work-Space had to be postponed.

After lunch, there was some hands-on session for coding Qt, mostly concentrating on signals and slots in which I had coded a simple Calculator additionally. It was fun. +Shantanu Tushar Jha and volunteers  quite energetically ran from one part to another with a spirit of clearing each and every doubt. Last but not the least for the day, the session concluded with a small talk by +Vishesh introducing to git basics like init, add, remove, diff, status, log, commit, patch, checkout, etc..

Its rightly said, "Work Hard, Party Harder". After the official end of Day-1, we had KDE 4.10 Release Party. A Yummy, tasty, delicious cake-cutting combined with the KDE song in the background. A Perfect Combination !


The best part of this meetup was, even a person who never ever used any kinda Linux before, not even  having an installation till yesterday were able to understand and write a small piece of code in qt and play with git basics at the end. There was excellent guidance provided by speakers. I remember few days back when I had to struggle hard for about a fortnight to get a roughly clear idea about qt, git and tons of new terms I was exposed to for the first time during that period. A freshers knew about it in just 7 hrs through this meetup. :) 
As it is rightly said, knowledge expands by sharing, It gives awesome feeling when you explain someone about KDE. Though am a not a expert, just 1 month old kid for this world, I love sharing it with my friends and help them getting started, installing required softwares and connect with mailing list and IRC for the project which interests them. I have actually helped few of my friends and it gave me immense pleasure.
Also, one more thing I would like to mention is though the journey upto now in KDE was quite amazing and the things which I learnt would never have been possible if focused purely on university-courses, still, deep within I always had some kind of fear. But after todays' talk & listening to phrases like "I never knew git during my university days", I felt somewhat more confident. :P Even, when +Vishesh said he got involved with Open Source during his second year, it left an impression on my mind as I could actually relate it with myself. I find myself walking on a parallel track and it gave me visions about my future ;)

This post can occupy few more bytes, but I think I should finally conclude here. Kudos to +Yash Shah  and +GDG DA-IICT  team. He really worked hard, put in a lot of effort and faced many hardship,  and yes, today it has reaped sweet fruits. I would like to thank Vishesh on behalf of everyone for making life much more simpler. Shantanu Jha and Rohan, thanks a lot for helping out people with their queries.

LET THE HACKING START TOMORROW ..!!!

P.S: Thanks Vaibhavi for helping me with this post.

7 comments:

  1. Your article left me thoughtless as I now regret for not attending the meet up thinking that it might eventually turn out in to a random college event. But people's opinion made it a dream come true. BTW the article was well gripped in its content making people jealous who by any chance did not attende the meet. Hope u learn even more with more fun ..All the very best for ur vision..

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    1. You srsly missed it.. Anyways, we are in one of India's best universities and there are many resources if this field interests you and u want to get started.. :)

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  2. Very nicely written post! Really missing all KDE fun :(

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    1. aabhar! :) (couldn't find way to type Gujarati fonts here )

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    2. Easy! ગુગલ ટ્રાન્સલિટરેશન :)

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