I was back to FOSSASIA this year after a gap of an year and nothing had changed other than the venue. The event had the same level of enthusiasm as before, though the crowd seemed to be less compared to the previous years.
This FOSSASIA was more special for the participants, organizers and the volunteers because this was the 10th year of the event. Kudos, to the organizing team for doing it successfully for last 10 years!
Day zero, the speakers informally gathered at the Lau Pa Sat street, where we shared some nice discussions along with sea food.
Sadly, the first day started out bad for me, with me waking up to bloodshot red eyes and burning sensation. I went back to have more some rest and later in the day headed to the conference after waking up.
The first day was a single-track event with the talks lined up one after another. Martin, from Debian, shared the varied differences and similarities within the open source communities. The panel on “What Opportunities Does “Open” Bring to Society?” was an interesting panel to sit through and listen to bunnie, Hong, Shanker, Dr. Graham, and Carsten share their opinions. Being there is the industry for long and embracing open source they shared their thoughts on how their employers embrace open source over time.
Recently, I’ve been looking IPFS (InterPlanetory File System) after we had a talk on the same during the Golang Bangalore Meetup. Jollen Chen in his talk shares how they are building distributed ledger/blochain from scratch for the IoT space. They use virtual blocks that provide a new blockchain design to ensure the real-time data transactions. This virtual blocks also add up with IPFS.
I lost track of time and could not attend the “Serverless with Knative”.
The second day, I did not attend a lot of talks rather went around the booths, and made connections in the hallway tracks. Elastic, Upcloud, UI-licious, Indeed, Microsoft, IBM, and others. There were a couple of communities too who had put up their booth. CentOS also had a booth of it’s own. We had our Fedora CoreOS stickers and Silverblue stickers up for display at the booth.
In talks, Rishav talked on the best practices to be followed while building Docker images. Manuel puts why/what problems is GraphQL trying to solve in comparison to REST. The under/over fetching principle in GraphQL/REST seems to be interesting to me and I shall put some reading around it and try to get something implemented around it. Rohan took us through the magical land of babel and codemod. He explained how he refactored and migrated to a different library by writing custom codemod, and explaining JavaScript AST, babel parser on the way.
On the third day of the event, I went to talk by Harsha who was talking on building intelligent intrusion detection system, the first half of the talk mostly talks about the basics about IDS, and the second half on how he uses machine learning, and the fields to build this intelligent IDS. As expected, Jason Zaman gives an amazing talk on how to leverage SELinux to debug issues, for conditional policies, for policy types etc. He also demoed the various SELinux commands to use to tool effectively as an system administrator. Abhishek, from Swiggy, how Redis sits in-front of MySQL as a caching layer. He also demonstrated the plugin that he built and shared a demo on the performance of the tool.
The last day, I gave a talk on how I leverage the container-workflow tool on my primary workstation using Silverblue. I also shared why we built Silverblue in the first place, and what happens behind the scenes. The good thing was just after my talk Sinny’s talk was scheduled which was on the upcoming Fedora CoreOS.
I was actually happy that our talks had a good amount of audience, and there was good amount of enthusiasm from the crowd. Few people where interested in knowing the release cycle of the Silverblue/Fedora CoreOS and if it would be different from the one Container Linux followed which was maintaining channels. Also, an interesting question was if there was limit to the number of package layering I can go while working with Silverblue.
Apart from the talk, I was reached out by a lot of people to know if Silverblue or the container-based workflow actually helps. I’ve to agree it’s not an easy task to pitch a unconventional way to manage your system and something which is totally new. Still, at the end of the day, I hope I had good discussion around the topic with a lot of people.
I also happened to visit the Singapore Hackerspace which is one of the places I love to visit. On second visit we met a enthusiastic group of hackers and makers who are out on travelling South East Asia.
To end, I really had a good time at Singapore and FOSSASIA. I met a lot of people whom I did not meet for years, built connections to meet them in the future, and learnt quite a lot of things. And, I also happened to learn some really nice soldering technique at the very end.
Cover image by Michael Cannon (CC BY-SA 2.0)