FOSS, How it changed my life??

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FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software

It's been about a year and a half since CONF.KDE,IN happened, people who were part of it would certainly know, how successful it was. Conf Kde was where my journey into Free and Open Source Softwate truly began. Helping organising the conference was a great satisfaction and an amazing learning curve to me. Meeting some amazing people who are really inspirational and friendly. I took back a lot of things from the conference.

If anyone of you have seen or heard “Harsha Bhogle's” talk at IIM-A, he speaks about the need for godfathers, role models in a particular field. He says because of the absence of such a god-fatherly figure in his field, he looked upto the cameramen who did a flawless job while capturing various cricket matches, he was in awe of the scorers and statisticians who had numbers of batsmaen and bowlers at the back of their hand, they were his role models and godfathers. This happened to me too.

In my life, in the things that interested me, there weren't many people whom I could idolize or look upto, I was constantly searching for people whom I could look upto for inspiration and guidance. While all this was running inside my head, one part of my mind told me to look at people in this amazing FOSS community. People who were highly passionate about the work they did, people who lived and breathed Free software. It was amazing how people in this community bonded with each other over codes, programming stalwarts spoke and encouraged budding geeks and coders. After witnessing this, I realised that these were my “Godfathers”.

During the Conf.KDE.IN in March 2011, I was lucky to meet and work with a few of the amazing FOSS guys, a few names here, Shantanu Tushar, Pradeepto, Sinny, Sudhendu, Madhusudan (he happens to be my bro's bestie ), Aditya Kavoor and so many other people. They were such awesome people, I was in awe of them. Working for the conference alongside them, I learnt a lot of things, especially the need to totally devote youreself to the thing you love to do, eat sleep and breathe it, only then will you be able to reach great heights in your field of interest. While working alongside them, I could see their love, devotion and passion for what they did. They took a lot of pride in what they did. Never were they tired of it. I was an outsider there, with no programming background at all, they made me feel at home, treating me as part of one big and happy family, listening to what I had to stay, guiding me and helping me at the work I was assigned to do and most of all motivating me at times. There is a Sanskrit saying which tell us, “knowledge which is not shared is always a waste”, people here are always ready to share!

It's through experiences like these, that we discover something new about ourself, something that could help shape our careers or lives.

While campaigning for this conference, my job was to go to various colleges and talk to students and convince them that this conference was amazing and by attending this conference, there would be a lot of value addition. I had about 5 colleges to campaign. Initially I was skeptical, but these folks convinced me and filled me up with confidence. I started the campaigning job with my college, went to various classes with a poster in hand spoke to hundreds of students on how this conference could change their lives. Some were courteous to listen to me and some weren't, but I kept my head high and did my job with a lot of pride and passion, which of course I had learnt from these FOSS folks. Fortunately my campaigning cameo paid off and as a result, no of people attending the conference shot up. While I was campaigning, I realised, that I enjoyed promoting/marketing it and to an extent was good at it too. This helped me make a very good choice in life, the choice was to take up marketing as part of my profession. Judging whether I was really good at it or this was just my self-pride was not very hard to figure out. Successful and knowledgeable people told me that I was indeed good at it ( They were not telling me just to make me feel good ), their decision was backed by some keen observations and good critical judgment. This made me feel good about myself and help me chalk out a path for my career. Today I work part time for a startup called Tailspin, where I get to do what I am passionate about and what I love to do. If I had not been part of FOSS, I would never have been able to discover what I loved. This is one of the greatest things that FOSS has given me and I will always be grateful for that.

The positives I derived don't end here. I made great friends, people with whom I went to movies, had dinner and shared a laugh with. Apart from a lot of value addition to my career, I made some great friends.

“FOSS did change my life”

This is Vattam signing off, until next time, goodbye and sayonara!