FUDCon APAC 2015 in Pune

I had the pleasure to attend my second FUDCon APAC, in Pune, India this time. I arrived the day before the conference at the airport in Bombay where I met Tuan. After four tiring hours, we arrived to Pune and met Kushal.

My contribution to the conference was a keynote on Fedora Workstation. I found out just a couple of days before the conference that my talk had been selected as a keynote. That is why I changed my presentation last minute, I removed slides with technical details, so that it’s understandable for general audience. I also didn’t speak about Fedora Workstation specifically, but about (Linux) desktop problems in general and how we’re trying to solve them in Fedora Workstation. I think the talk went pretty well and received a lot of questions in Q&A at the end of the keynote and later during hallway conversations. The most frequent complaint of users was lack of multimedia support, so I added it to my presentation, and explained that it’s not really a technical issue, and that we’re working hard to make it better, and that we might see a significant improvement in Fedora 23.

Me giving the keynote, photo is courtesy of Kushal Das.

I also really enjoyed other keynotes, especially the one by Tenzin Chokden who has worked on adding Tibetan translations to Fedora.

I also achieved other things:

• participated in the discussion about the location for the next FUDCon APAC.
• shared with APAC ambassadors what is our system for swag production and distribution in EMEA.
• attended a key-signing party and got my GPG key signed by Harris Pillay, Dennis Gilmore, Jared Smith and others.
• met a lot of Fedora contributors from India and people from Pune office of Red Hat.
• agreed with Ryan Lerch that we would create a repository of artworks for Fedora swag production (yay!)

I’m staying in India for a few more days. I and Dennis Gilmore went to the historical center of Pune on Monday and to highlands near Pune yesterday.

I’d like to thank Fedora Project for providing me with accommodation during the conference and taking care of me (it was my first conference where they arranged a pick-up at the airport for me!). My big thanks go to the whole organizing team and especially Kushal who has been a great host to us.