FOSSMeet 2016

FOSSMeet is an annual event at NIT Calicut that brings together the Free and Open Source Community from around the country.

FOSSMeet is the annual Free and Open source software meet at NIT Calicut. We are inviting proposals for talks and workshops at FOSSMeet 2016.

What we are looking for

Through FOSSMeet, we intend to get the attendees, mostly students, get started with the development and usage of free software. You may propose to conduct a lecture, demo, tutorial, workshop, discussion or panel at FOSSMeet. If the contents of your session is the ‘I am feeling lucky’ result of some Google search, there is low probability that it’ll be accepted. Same applies to proposals titled ‘The absolute beginner introduction to X’ and others on a similar line. On the other hand, if your talk is on some obscure, albeit important, free software project that will go over most students head, this might not be the best platform to deliver that talk. There are always exceptions and we leave that to your judgement. If our audience wants it, we’ll try our best to accommodate it. Of course, if you find people interested in your proposal, you can always call a BoF. We are all for BoF’s! :)

Take the above with a pinch of salt. They are no s̶t̶r̶i̶c̶t̶ ̶r̶u̶l̶e̶s̶, only guidelines. All your proposals are welcome and we celebrate every single one that we receive! :D Looking forward to see you folks here.

Audience

Your audience (mostly) comprises of smart, above average, GNU/Linux aware students.

Important dates

Call for proposals opens: Nov 19, 2015
Proposal submission deadline: D̶e̶c̶ ̶3̶0̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶1̶5̶ Jan 23, 2016
Proposal acceptance: J̶a̶n̶ ̶0̶7̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶1̶6̶ Jan 26, 2016
Presentation upload: J̶a̶n̶ ̶1̶4̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶1̶6̶ Feb 2, 2016

Contact Us:

For more information about speaking and proposals, contact speakers@fossmeet.in.

Hosted by

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software, conducted at National Institute of Technology, Calicut. The funnel is a space for proposals and voting on events. more

Steven Deobald

@stevendeobald

The Worst Programmer I Ever Met

Submitted Jan 19, 2016

Relationships are hard. Software is hard. FOSS communities often represent the most difficult intersection of these two axes. Attendees will come out with practical lessons and tools for working in teams, bettering themselves, and avoiding some of software’s most expensive mistakes.

Outline

Six years ago, I met the most destructive programmer of my career. He wrote huge systems full of complexities and interdependencies that no one else on our 10-person team could easily understand. His attitude was dismissive, poisonous, and adversarial. When confronted, he would work harder, faster, and often in secret to mould the codebase into a shape he preferred. Even in a closed environment, he at one point created a fork. After he was fired, it took years and millions of dollars to undo the damage he had done.

And yet, we all make many of the mistakes he made. Some of these mistakes we make on a daily basis. Some on different scales. It is important for us to understand, technically and socially, the cost of the actions we take -- and the actions we don’t.

This talk will walk through specific examples of code, abstractions, architectures, and collaboration styles which can break software systems, destroy teams, and make your project’s community unhappy. We will, of course, learn how to avoid these pitfalls and heal the wounds when we inevitably come across them.

Speaker bio

Steven has a made a lot of mistakes in his career, some more serious than others. There are costs -- both quantifiable and elusive -- to every action we take. Recognizing and understanding these costs has been one of the most profound learnings in his short 15-year career which has spanned a variety of teams: healthy and unhealthy, open and closed, insightful and destructive.

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Hosted by

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software, conducted at National Institute of Technology, Calicut. The funnel is a space for proposals and voting on events. more