This is a month of FOSS events – and one of them was GNUnify 2013 at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research. There were talks ranging from systems stuff like GCC, about Android hacking to KDE development. We met people from communities of KDE, Mozilla, Wikimedia, friends from RedHat and of course the awesome awesome organizers and volunteers.

It is nice to see a Free Software event like GNUnify to turn into a tradition where teachers and students work hard to create what is rightly said a forum to unite open minds.

Day1 of the event had lots of talks including our very own KDE – we planned a full day track on KDE primarily aimed to introduce people to KDE (and Open Source in general) and give them starting tips on how to get started. The talks started with introduction of Qt and a hands-on where people tried writing sample applications. Something new here was that we had to cover QtQuick/QML which these days is the preferred way of doing GUI in Qt, but at the same time we couldn't leave out the traditional QWidget style of doing GUI. This was primarily because of two reasons, first most of the current KDE applications are written in QWidget so people will need that if they want to contribute and secondly the desktop components of QML still aren't widely used.

We started with the Qt talk and the hands-on was very well received by the attendees. They tried Qt Creator and created sample apps, winning KDE.in tshirts in the process  After lunch Sinny talked about and gave a demo on using QtQuick/QML for writing fluid and modern GUI. This was followed by a talk on getting started with KDE development where we demo'ed a small hack in rekonq (a KDE browser based on WebKit) so that people get confident that its pretty easy to get started. We also spent an hour or so in answering questions that people had in mind about contributing.

The organizers were kind enough to arrange a pool-side dinner for us and it turned out to be a nice opportunity to socialize more, and meet all of the volunteers at one place. And whats more, I got a chance to be picture'd with the ????

Day2 saw talks on various kinds of topics like Android, Python, Drupal etc and I gave a Plasma Active demo to a group of volunteers. After Day1 which was kinda tiring due to the day long session, the 2nd day was quite fun with meeting friends again and chatting over lots of stuff 🙂 Not only this, we had a nice evening and dinner, thanks to Siteshwar.

(Photos courtesy Sinny Kumari, view full album here )