Mukti 2014 is the annual national level technical symposium on Free and Open Source Software of the GNU/Linux Users’ Group NIT Durgapur held from 31st January - 2nd February 2014.

I’ve been attending Mukti for last four years. Unlike, the previous years when i usually attended Mukti as a student participant, this year I attended Mukti as a guest speaker.

Day 0 (30th January 2014)

After a hectic travel from Bangalore to Durgapur via Kolkata. TMC called of the largest Brigade Rally in Kolkata on the very day. The bus i was travelling from Kolkata Airport to Howrah station dropped me at an unknown location. I somehow dragged myself and my luggage to station. The condition at the station was worse, packed compartments including the reserved ones and people fighting for their seats. After a big quarrel, I somehow got my seat.

Sayantan a.k.a kenzo450D came over to the station to pick me up. I reached NIT Durgapur at around 9pm. I did a overnight stay at kenzo’s hostel room. Chandan Kumar arrived early morning the next day.

Day 1 (31st January 2014)

It was a typical winter morning. Living in bangalore for sometime now, I was not accustomed with the winter. I was actually feeling good. The event started at around 10:30AM. Chandan went over the the auditorium to set up the system for his evening session on OpenStack. I gathered some of the students in a classroom and told them the importance of contributing to Open Source. Chandan joined in after sometime. We discussed how contributing helped us and more importantly why shouldn’t we neglect the subjects in our curricullum.

Chandan gave a session on OpenStack, explaining the various components and setting it up on local maching. Later that night we went over for a dinner with the organizing committee, there we met with Shahid Farooqui.

Day 2 (1st February 2014)

The event started off with my workshop on building webapps with Flask . The workshop started off with a chaos with no system having Flask, virtualenv and git installed. I, along with the committee took quick steps and installed the pre-requisite on the systems. I discussed with them how Flask plays an important role in Fedora. The workshop went pretty well. The audience was around 60 people.

Github: https://github.com/sayanchowdhury/mukti-flask-101

We then went over to an auditorium along with some enthusiastic students, Chandan and I gave them a task to build an IRC bot using the Twisted framework. At a parallel workshop on “Building Firefox OS apps”, we met Kaustav, Biraj, Umesh, Jai and Gaurab. We went for a dinner later that night will all the guest speakers and organizers.

Day 3 (2nd February 2014)

On Day 3, I coordinated in the Mozilla workshop in the beginning. Later that day we hacked on our projects with some of the students messing with the IRC bot. In the evening, at the lightening talk session I showed the students how contribute to various Open Source organization. It was kind of a demo version of this blog post. I showed the attendees the various websites to start contributing.

Thanks to the complete Mukti team specially Anish, Vivek and Sayantan, who did a commendable job. Hope Mukti 2015 is bigger and better :)

Images copyright: Sayantan Datta