I attended FOSSASIA 2023 summit held at Lifelong Learning Institute, Singapore. A 3 day long parallel talk filled conference. Its my second time attending FOSSASIA. The first one was 2018 summit. Like last time, I didn’t attend much talks but focussed on networking with people. A lot of familiar faces there. PV Anthony, Harish, etc.

I vounteered to run Debian Booth at the exhibition hall distributing stickers, flyers. Rajudev also helped me at the booth. Most of the people there used debian or its derivates or know debian already, its easier for me that way, that I don’t have do much explaining compared to other booths. Thanks to Parth for looking after booth in my breaks.

Sometimes our booth also act as cloak room :). Ours was close to the entrance door and we may be similar faces to folks. So people come and drop their bags before they go to talks.

One thing I love about the such conference is that people have very different hardwares that I never able to see otherwise. I remember KDE booth had a Steam Value portable gaming board running KDE plasma. Then a person have this eyeglass which act as a monitor. Then the usual DJI drones but custom programmed. It was very lovely to meet and play around with exotic hardwares.

Kurian whom I met during a Debian packaging workshop in Kerala was a speaker at FOSSASIA. He presented a talk titled “OpenAI Whisper and it’s amazing power to do finetuning”. I was his unofficial PR guy, taking pictures :).

Weather

Clear sky, little hot and humid. The weather was quite nice for me except the surprise rain and small thunderstorms. Comparing to my place’s temperature, its wonderful.