What I learnt by building Vyaakaran to make learning fun!

My first ever conference talk was at IndiaFOSS 2.0 last year. Since then, I have given talks at a few other conferences thanks to the confidence I gained from my IndiaFOSS talk last year. I had been planning for this talk for a long time. I started working on the Vyaakaran project in 2021 and I was looking for a perfect stage to talk about this project along with sharing my learnings while building it with the community. When IndiaFOSS 3.0 was announced, I knew this is exactly where I wanted to launch Vyaakaran.

Day 1

Unfortunately, I could not attend a lot of talks on the first day because I was busy networking and talking to the attendees. One of the things I really like about IndiaFOSS is the diversity of the attendees. You have students, professionals, and even people who aren’t from a tech background. This diversity encourages very interesting conversations that you don’t usually have at a traditional tech conference dedicated to one particular technology.

I remember having discussions around Frontend, Compiler Design, Rust, DevOps, Design, Product building and so much more just under one roof. People also appreciated the work that went into building Vyaakaran and shared ideas on how it can be improved further. Some folks also identified my side-product – Slant it, which I had used for some of the slides of my talk which they thought was a really interesting use of the product 💜

Day 2

I spent most of the second day attending various talks. The conference also had an open-mic session towards the very end, where anyone could come up on stage and talk about anything related to FOSS – how can we improve the FOSS ecosystem in India? What other initiatives FOSS United can do? Any feedback about the conference and suggestions about future events. This is something I feel more conferences should do as it’s a great way to keep the community truly involved in the journey.

Some of my favorite talks(in no particular order) were:

• “FOSS in undergraduate education” by Anil Gulecha
• “Toying with DNS” by Kailash Nadh
• “WinkNLP - a journey to open source” by Sanjay Kumar Saxena
• “Bridging the gap: Teaching FOSS on YouTube” by Hussain Nagaria
• “Using WebTorrent trackers for purposes other than torrents” by Subin Siby

Conclusion

IndiaFOSS is truly a different kind of a conference. It has a very humbling and grassroots vibe to it where the community is self-motivated to come together, share knowledge and bring a change. It might lack the glamour of high-profile tech conferences, but this authenticity and staying true to its nature is what I love about IndiaFOSS that draws me to it every year 💚

References

• Vyaakaran: View project  GitHub repo
• Slant it, my product that I used to create the demo videos of Vyaakaran in the slides: slantit.app
• IndiaFOSS Website: indiafoss.net

Note: Slides for this talk is not available, as its file size is too large due to the kind of media it contains.