1 Year at FOSS United
Awfully fun ventures. Just a bunch of honest opinions and experiences. It’s been almost 1 month since I’m trying to write this. This blog is solely, a record of my whole year and also I like storytelling.
11 March 2023 was my first interaction with FOSS United at MumbaiFOSS 2023 as an attendee. I traveled all the way from Solapur to Mumbai first time alone for the conference, it was a good beginning for a good event as a FOSS Enthusiast, before MumbaiFOSS, the definition of events/conference was very different for me. I was standing in a corner with one of my telegram friend looking at Kailash, Vishal and Rushabh and a bunch of other students and people surrounded around them, at that time I was clueless who these tall and geeky looking guys were.
At the time I bought tickets for MumbaiFOSS, I had also applied for a talk at PuneFOSS and it was selected fortunately after some days of MumbaiFOSS. I proposed a CFP about “Introduction to Minimalist Distributions and Packaging with Arch User Repository”, pretty dumb, but I was happy because it was my first ever talk and I was going to talk about something I used to flex as a kid a year ago “BTW I use Arch hahaha”. There was a figure around in the conference who felt like he was standing out from the majority. Vishal, it was. It was my first time talking to him back then. Just that same guy fumbling tons of times while speaking, but it was nice talking to him even if it was for like 2-5 minutes while having the snacks in the conference.
Ahead on, I remember that I asked Vishal after PuneFOSS if there was something I could volunteer for in FOSS United. I used to chat with Vishal on random topics asking him random questions which he most of the time answered without hesitation. After that, I started helping majorly in the organization of Mumbai Meetups.
Once, in a call Vishal asked me if I was interested in learning some python + frappe and maybe do an internship. I was super excited as always I did not have much idea about how an internship is and how it is different from full timer (I still don’t know). But it was pretty fun, I and harsh started volunteering for the platform project during June.
I’ve had a hell lot of good/bad experiences in this one whole year. I’ve seen hiring and I’ve also seen firing. I’ve also seen how people just change all of a sudden in a very short and peculiar time, I’ve also seen how different a person can be “online” and “offline”.
To be very honest, people say its always good to choose one thing over multiple, but very funnily interesting when you try to do two critical things at the same time. I was doing college + office sometimes offline and sometimes remotely. I’m talking about remote job btw, Remote college is a dream isn’t it ?
I always loved the poem “The Road not taken” by Robert Frost, and I was always trying to do in my life. But, in my case I Wouldn’t say that the road I choose was already full of nice experiences, I find myself very lucky for whatever I learnt and only those things came into my way.
When I started involving as a volunteer in the FOSS United Community, it didn’t feel anything different, my day was opening Terminal, Telegram chat seeing whats going on new. Vishal gave me desk access during May 2023, so I was always helping event organizers whenever possible and sideways learning Frappe.
Initial days!
I left from my home town being a bit sad, but deep down I was very excited. I was staying in a very cheap PG (rent around 6.5k/mo) but at that time “I did not know what a good PG was”. I slept well the night before. I said “Welcome” to all the upcoming adventures. I was excited that I’d get to sit in a office and work with people. I’ll have my own cubicle and interesting people around me. During this whole time, I decided that I’ll keep my mind active about what work I do, and honestly also about being in the probation period.
First day of the office on September 1, it rained heavily the night before. I was walking towards the office and the great godly BMTC bus came by the side and I had mud drops all over my cargo and back of the T-shirt. I said “Ahh, Fine!” and continued towards the office.
Sometimes bad things have to happen before good things can.
Initially, for me my work was “What vishal tells me to do”. So, I used to do whatever he used to ask, and apart from that, the platform as well (sometimes). I used to do many other things in the organization. I volunteered for the OASIS Summit, and did a lot of other jobs (I can’t remember them now). I was obsessed with our office (I still am), I was a broke kid in bengaluru. During those days, I did not know what was “going out in bangalore” on weekends, so all I used to do was go to office on weekends too. It was fun honestly, Sunday in the office was “Mai hi Raja, Mai hi Mantri”. I used to work, watch anime (rarely did this tho), tinker around with random things, and try to touch what I was not supposed to, but most of the times I left no trace.
The best thing was I had the privilege to learn whatever I want and work on whatever I felt like. So, I used to do whatever felt interesting to me. During that time IndiaFOSS was just a month away, I had known about it for almost a month, but I applied for volunteering later (which became my job lol). IndiaFOSS just became like a goal for all of us. Riya was leading IndiaFOSS 2023, with good enough management skills, but whatever you do a conference is never going to be perfect. I had just fucked myself with a lot of work, I was taking up multiple tasks during IndiaFOSS 3.0 and doing it all the time. During that time, it was just Me, Riya and Vishal in the office and we used to work in office till 11-12 AM in the midnight. Ngl, those 2 months were the best time for me during my Internship. Till date, I wonder how I managed to pull so many working hours.
Every now and then I had to travel back to Solapur, for giving my class tests and again come back to Bangalore. I managed to complete my journals somehow in the first semester with my internship and then studying for the test while I was travelling in the train. This was the time when I learnt passing is not at all hard, it’s hard to score good marks because you’re hungry for marks.
Generalist or Specialized Generalist ?
This year since Rahul joined us as our CEO, things got way better than before. Rahul bought in more conversations and proper processes within the org. A 1-on-1 with Rahul is what I am always excited for. Looking at my previous works I was always confused what do I do in this organization. That’s when we started discussing about being generalists or specialists.
Not many NPO have a dedicated team of people working on the technical aspect. We are 3 people working on all the technical stuff at FOSS United recently guided by Rahul. 2 of them just fresh out of college and all of us are trying to self learn and implement at the same time. No one came here with tons of experience. We do not have any option other than self learning or observing other developers out there.
I always wanted to be a generalist, but the fear of being “Jack of all trades, Master of none” was always there in me. During that one hour long discussion, I was still choosing the generalist pathway. That’s what I had been doing through my time at FOSS United. Usually experimenting, sometimes writing shit code (most of which has already been rewritten), sometimes self hosting and maintaining applications needed for the team, and even writing documentations at some point. But But, have a look towards the full quote :D.
A jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one.
Observations
I always wanted to do something different than the majority. But, in this whole year I realized that you can’t do great things while you’re thinking or having the realization that “I am doing great things”, great things happen are not done, they happen. You’re actually doing great things when you hear it from others. Being around people who don’t always appreciate is the best only if you’re not someone who might become under-confident because of no-praise or appreciation at work.
Getting exposed to good stuff is very important. There’s lack of exposure in Tier-II and Tier-III cities as a student. There’s no one who can be blamed neither the teachers not the students. How would anyone know about Functional Programming when they’ve never heard about it from anywhere. I believe every other thing is copied or inspired from something, nothing in this world turns out to be original or just fresh new stock. Ideas, good code, knowledge and literally everything is either passed on or taken inspiration from. I am thankful to god that I got so much of early exposure to all the professional things. I made some of tries at providing exposure to others, but that did not workout much.
On a broader level, one thing which I observed was that India lacks enthusiasts. Why does it feel like everything these days has become just for the sake of name ? There are more amount of people calling themselves “FOSS Enthusiast” but there are so less people who are actually enthusiasts. For majority of the students everything has become job-centric.
Some inspiration for this blog also comes from netchampfaris.in. Another great engineer from frappe.io. I got to have a very small 20 minute conversation with him during MumbaiFOSS 2.0. It all started with me asking how many years has it been since he joined frappe and he answered “I’m completing 8 years this month” and I was like “wow, I’m completing 8 months this month”. A hilariously big gap right ? Those 20 minutes with him were so much more valuable for me than the panel happening inside the hall. Got to learn some nice work tips from him which are taking a lot of time for me to apply, but I’ve applied some already.
Views about FOSS United
I have been a integral part of many core and internal discussions of FOSS United and I was always asked to speak what my opinion was and was never asked to shut up on serious discussions. Honestly, I’d say in this whole year I never saw myself as an 18 year old and I feel like I totally forgot the fact.
In this last one year, FOSS United has just grown very rapidly. I started reading about FOSS United and its work during Feb 2023 and the changes are very drastic and it has gotten better regarding its processes. The employee team grew from 3 people to now 8.
It’s also great platform for students to come and learn. FOSS United’s network has very nerdy, geeky and great professionals always ready to give talks, take workshops and attend events. Of course, there are also more people who “just talk” but If a student knows how to leverage all the knowledgeable geeks (which very less students know how to) then surely its very beneficiary.
Talking about the culture in the org, Its good and fun, I wouldn’t say its great. Majorly because, we’re all just straight out of college and no one here had any work experience before other than some. So, no one has any idea of what to do in weird and harder situations among’st each other.
One thing I want to improve at FOSS United is that we still use a lot of closed source software (Gmail is the biggest) and I want to try going fully open source with whatever tools, and platforms we use. I agree with the fact that one can’t always go fully open source, there’s at-least something which is closed source. But, we’re just a bunch of hypocrites if we talk and promote FOSS all over India but don’t embrace it ourselves in our day to day lives.
Academics ?
I have to say, gambling so much while you’re studying in high school (diploma, but I’ll call it high school for brevity.) is surely very hard. I was very lucky to have a supportive mother and sister who wrote my manuals asked their friends to write my journals during the deadlines. There are a lot of clashes in your mind as someone who is seeing the reality as well as sitting in front of the teachers proposing fake propaganda’s. I am glad I somehow passed with 68% without even studying for 1 single hour, nothing to brag about tho. All I wrote in exams what I was doing at work, and I magically passed!
Now, I’ve finally taken admission into a very small institute for B.Tech where any random donkey can get admission. Just so that I can continue do whatever I like doing.