Life Of Navin

It's been quite some time since I've updated the blog, but believe me, I've wanted to do so at a much earlier date! But I've been amazingly busy over the last month and a half or so.

Loads of craziness in the works, and I can proudly claim that February 2010 was the best month of my life (so far)!!

Why?? Read on and I'm confident you'll agree...

Feb started off on a great note with TEDxBITSGoa on the first Friday (5th Feb). Despite the initial hiccups with the projection and sound system, the event went off well. Kudos to the guys from BITS for managing to bring together so many amazing individuals under one roof. It was super-inspiring to listen to guys like Himanshu Parikh, Arvind Gupta, Nikhil Velpanur, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett Orlando speak about their lives. A special mention again of Mr. Himanshu Parikh, whose work in slum development really brought tears to my eyes. He's a person I really really hope I get to work with over the next decade or so of my life. He encompasses (for me atleast) exactly what being an "engineer" is all about.

Still high on TEDxBITSGoa, I headed off to NullCon the very next day (6th Feb), a Indian hacker conference, where I was to be a speaker. And believe me, Nullcon was the awesomest event ever!! The whole thing was informal as can be (the way I like it), with gyaan sharing going on on all fronts. What I liked best was that there was no audience as such. It was more like a bunch of network security professionals and enthusiasts meeting at a 5-star to discuss their topic of interest. Kinda like a large BoF session. Met some amazing people like Raoul Chiesa (a legendary hacker who currently works for the UN in a cybercrime branch UNICRI), Cassio Goldschmidt, Prince Boonlia, Veysel Oozer amongst others. The whole event kinda reminded me of the X-Files, since many conspiracy theories (and methods) were discussed. I say this also because quite a few talks followed the 0-disclosure policy (i.e. no photos/videos/external discussions). NullCon was two days of complete awesomeness, and it concluded with my talk (which was just before the ending keynote) on the 7th. My talk was, much to my awe, well received by the crowd. Here's an online copy of my NullCon presentation, though I doubt it'll make much sense without the speaker's voice. :)

So it's around the 10th of the month, and I've already had two huge events. But this isn't the end of my Feb, not even close!! :)

On the 18th, I left for Pune, for GNUnify, A FOSS conference/workshop organised by SICSR. Another great opportunity to meet loads of cool people such as a certain "engineer hater" Ajachi, Gautam Rege, Manjusha Joshi ma'am and the entire FOSSEE team from IIT Bombay. GNUnify had so much going on over 2 days, that despite my best efforts, I managed to barely attend 30% of the events. Yet, over these 48 hours, I attended some fabulous sessions/BoF's on coding in CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Drupal and Python. The talks by the guys from Mozilla (the main sponsors for GNUnify 2010) were extremely captivating. They spoke on topics ranging from l18n to HTML5, and showcased some of the newer products by Mozilla such as Bespin and Weave. Overall, GNUnify was a great experience, except for the fact that the crowd was too mixed, with complete newbies right next to professionals!! I didn't like the fact that I had to explain the ls command to a guy next to me during one of the workshops!! But this qualm apart, GNUnify was a great event. Plus, after pronouncing it wrongly for over 2 months, I finally learnt the right pronounciation of GNUnify (it's "ganu-nify", incase you're wondering).

The very next week (24rd Feb), I was in the IT hub of the country, Bengaluru, though this time for a family event, a cousin's marriage, that too a marriage of the only type that should be legal.... a love marriage!! Bengaluru, being the city I was born in, holds a special place in my heart, and it was great to be in Bengaluru after nearly a year! The whole wedding was more of a neo-hindu marriage with pujas being followed by jam sessions!! :) Overall I had a great 4 days out in the intellectual capital of India.

Phew!! That was enough travelling for one month eh?
Well, this was just one part of the awesomeness that February 2010 was.
Second part coming up soon!! :)