NIT Warangal University Event

NIT Warangal‘s IEEE student chapter is conducting a two day opensource workshop today and tomorrow (17th and 18th.) I am keynote speaker today at the start of the event. I originally planned for a two part presentation, the first one outlining the Sun’s innovations and contributions to the open source and a short introduction to DTrace as the second one.

The laptop somehow didn’t work well with the projectors there in the room. So I had to load my presentation to Ajay Kumar’s linux laptop. I spent the scheduled two hours just with the first presentation. By the time I completed my presentation, the folks at NITW arranged a SunBlade 2500 running with Solaris 10 in a stall. So I could continue for one more hour during lunch break with the DTrace demonstration.

Here are some interesting questions during the talk and the demo.

• Why did you choose to be an architect than becoming a manager? (In addition the the technical passion, having an option of balancing my own personal time)
• What is the benefit for a company when it involves its employees with opensource products than developing its proprietary software? (To drive adoption, to encourage participation, to build an ecosystem faster and easier)
• Why do we have so many choices in open source? Can’t we make standard distributions and live with them? (Well, having choices of implementations is the fundamental driving force of opensource. However, open source drives standards of formats)
• How do you balance between your work pressure, your family and your passion for opensource and blogs? (Thanks to Jerry Wang, the manager at Sun who sent me to a 7 habits course a few years ago)
• Overall, the sessions are very good and hope they are informative enough for the audience.

Now, let me talk a bit about the NITW backdrop. The students looked enthusiastic, the labs looked well equipped and the faculty seem to be interested. The walks back and forth between the guest house, the breakfast canteen, the seminar hall and the lunch place are long and took away lot of time during this short visit of mine. By the end, I wish I hired a local taxi.
Well, the travel back to Hyderabad is a bigger story by itself. I booked myself for a return ticket in East Coast Express, which is supposed to start at 14.40. One of the faculty members dropped me at the train station and I insisted that they return from there, without escorting me all the way to the train. Once in the station, I was told that the train is canceled. The next train is about 2 hours away and getting accommodation in A/C class is very tough. So I wanted to try out the Bus transportation. I went to the bus station and was told that all the A/C and Nonstop buses are full. I didn’t want to hire a private transportation for that kind of long distance. So I got into an ordinary bus, but had to stand in the bus for the first hour of the 3+ hour journey. I got off 5 km from the Secunderabad Railway station and got into a local bus to reach the station, where my car is parked. So I reached home very exhausted, 4.5 hours after starting in Warangal.

Looking back at the day while watching the Cricket Match between India and Bangladesh, I feel even though it is a tiring trip, it is worth because it might be helpful for the attendees.