Day 2 @ KDE- Meetup

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As you might have guessed (evident from title also :P) this post is to share about day 2 @ KDE Meetup..

Many people are expecting a huge- writeup for today but I really apologize as I am feeling very exhausted and tired at this moment. Its 2 am over here now, I am feeling very sleepy but I would finish off blogging now only. I think people are waiting eagerly for this post and I don't want you guys to hold on for next couple of hrs as am not sure when I would get some free time tomorrow. I really hate Mondays ! After an amazing weekend, its too hard to go back to lectures, labs and tutorials :( . Okay, I know I have deviated from the topic and coming back, today was sadly, the last day of KDE Meetup.

It began with introduction to Plasma Desktop Environment which was postponed yesterday. +Shantanu Tushar Jha introduced his audience to this familiar desktop environment, a tool required for modern desktop computing experience. Plasma is really cool ! Beautiful looks, pleasant to eyes and once can configure the way he wants just by few mouse clicks here and there. Adding widgets and creating a new activity and customizing how user wants is the thing I appreciate about Plasma desktop. +Shantanu showed his first accepted patch which motivated me and am looking forward to have one of mine very soon :)

Next, the session on KDE-Education Project by Rishabh Arora was worth in terms of taking a start with easy and small applications.

After spending some time talking about Google Summer of Code, Season of KDE and Code-In,+Vishesh Handa delivered a talk about Nepomuk, the social semantic desktop. He demonstrated some of the terms and functionalities like File Indexing, Email Indexing, Instant Messaging, Connecting data together, Ratings, Queries, Data Visualisation and many more things.Though aiming just to introduce user side, he actually scared people at a moment typing some shell command :P

After lunch, Hacking began. Hands-on workshop taught right from cloning a repository, building it from source to how about going around with change a piece of code, debug and actually run what one has modified. Finding which portion of huge source needs to be modified is one of the key features in going about fixing any bug. Today, in the workshop it was the first time I modified some piece of code and actually saw it working correctly. The task when requested Url http://www.google.com was requested it should actually load Url http://www.kde.org in Rekonq browser.

When I approached KDE mailing list for the first time, I was pretty confident enough that I knew C,C++ and other stuffs, but once when I looked real-world coding and Qt, I actually realized that I was in a huge misconception ! Running small lab codes correctly, one can't be call himself proficient programmer. And Yay ! I realized it very soon, before having my B.Tech degree. Most of the people whom I have interacted with have this realization when they join some xyz company.

Lastly, this kind of Meetups are really worthy and they should be organized frequently at different locations to spread awareness far and wide. 

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.

KDE MEETUP 2013

Finally, the day has arrived for which I was eagerly waiting i.e. THE KDE MEETUP-2013. Most of you would be knowing about this event but some of you would be wondering what is it and this post is all about it.

"KDE-MEETUP 2013", the first large scale open source Meetup in Gujarat and the largest meetup of KDE contributors in India since conf.kde.in in 2011. It is an event for Qt/KDE contributors and open source enthusiasts to meet up, share their knowledge, contribute, learn, play, have fun and create limitless possibilities using Qt and KDE. It will run for 2 days with talks on the latest KDE developments, sessions on how you can start contributing to open source, coding sessions and workshop.

KDE MEETUP 2013 is the first large scale open source Meetup in Gujarat and the largest KDE event in India after conf.kde.in in 2011. It will be held on February 23rd-24th at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication technology(DA-IICT), Gandhinagar. I find myself very lucky to be in the Institute which is one of the top ten technology schools —the best private technology university—in India. In 2012, 17 students from the Institute were selected for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) internship program (the most selections of any university in India). Eight of those students were selected to contribute to KDE, and much of their work has been included in KDE software releases.

This Meetup would be a really great opportunity for all those who wish to get started on Open source contribution. The primary focus is to introduce people to the world of infinite possibilities of Open source development by teaching them about the basic tools for development including Qt. Also, this event appeals to those who are already familiar with the tools since there will also be specialized talks on certain topics by experts. Also there will be hackathons after the talks which shall make this event enjoyable and fruitful for everyone involved with Open source including teachers, developers and students.

KDE Meetup is a forum to gather as many KDE contributors as possible at one place again after conf.kde.in 2011.FOSS events like those of KDE itself have been always concentrated around then same region in the country and this event is aimed to keep that going in other region as well.  So Indian KDE volunteers along with GDG DA-IICT came together to organize a conference solely dedicated to KDE with an aim to spread KDE and FOSS as far as possible. Our main target is to include more and more students from India in the KDE community and also to get them involved with Open source development and what better way to spread awareness and knowledge than to organize a really lively and enjoyable event which shall appeal to the students and combine the core elements of learning and fun. The expertise of the speakers and the quaint and cool campus environment shall also serve as prime factors in making the event a pleasant and extremely insightful one.


Summarizing this 2-day KDE Meetup-

Date: 23rd-24th February,2013.

Venue: Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication technology(DA-IICT), Gandhinagar.

Experts:Vishesh Handa, Pradeepto Bhattacharya, Shantanu Jha and Rishabh Arora

Primary Focus:Introducing people to Open Source by teaching basic tools and spread KDE and FOSS.

Target: Include more Indian students in KDE Community and to get them involved with Open Source Development.

Activities:Talks and workshops by seasoned Qt and KDE developers followed by Hackathon. Discussing brainstorming new ideas that could be possible with Qt and KDE code.Hacking a lot of Qt and KDE code and meet new people and share the passion of making awesome software and being a part of a rich community.



I am up for this Meetup. Are You ?

For those who haven't registered yet, there are on-spot registrations. Do not miss the opportunity to become a part of the most amazing community.