Ah! It was an exciting weekend, visited National Institute of Technology, Warangal for a talk, and met with ThoughtWorkers from all over India at Goa!

As you've guessed, this post is about the former, I was supposed to give a talk on how to get started with KDE and some git basics. Landed at Hyderabad at around 8PM and after having awesome Hyderabadi Biryani, I travelled to Warangal which took 3 hours. Thankfully, Harshit who came to receive me at the airport was very interesting and we talked about software, economics, to quantum mechanics (!!) Just like talks I have given at other NITs, the hospitality was awesome, really loved it.

I was kinda nervous in the night as I had to cover everything that I planned to, plus some stuff that Pradeepto would've covered but he couldn't come. Decided that it should be nice if I can show the students how to begin with a simple hack, and rekonq – KDE's webkit based browser came in handy. We started with installing git on everyone's laptop, but sadly at around 11AM the whole town lost power, and there wasn't any backup I shared my experiences and story on contributing to FOSS and the take-aways of spending your time on it, and the students practiced some git on their machines after we realized that power ain't gonna come back. I was really happy with the enthusiasm, that the students kept on going until their batteries almost died and even when they were sweating. You see, git ain't that confusing if you haven't used SVN

(Thats the only photo I could get, the organizers were kinda busy with getting the power back that they couldn't click more photos)

We got some power backup from generators the event guys managed to hire, however we still had lack of Internet, so instead of having the students do some small stuff on rekonq, I did a brief interactive demo on how to browse the source to look for the place to put your code to get some functionality. The response was pretty good, and more importantly, more than half of the participants were girls, *and* they were pretty interactive.

The good part– At 4:30 PM I had to rush to the airport to catch my flight to Mumbai and eventually to Goa to join fellow TW'ers for the Away Day. Sitting at the Mumbai airport, I got an email from a girl who was trying some git stuff on her laptop but had some questions. It just feels so nice when people go back and do stuff, looks to be a good beginning.

Awesome job and my thanks to everyone that made it possible, Sarath, Shailja and Harshit – you guys are awesome 🙂