Gold Ayan's Tinker Garage

This year, I got an opportunity to be a volunteer at the JSLover conference which helped me a lot for TOSSConf 2025 preparation, as well as last year SFD(Software Freedom Day) 2024 event.

KanchiLug volunteers, Pailagam Institute and St.joseph students are The reasons we can successfully hold this conference with great success.

I We implemented a lot of things at the conference

Each of the above tasks comes with its own set of issues, but with Volunteers, we can finalise the details before the conference starts.

Workshop

  • Self-hosting workshop
    • It went great. The only thing I regret is that we are only able to cover Jellyfin.
  • Clojure
    • This workshop is not only about programming language but about a thought process.
    • How to approach the problem.
    • Functional paradigms that we can utilise in other programming languages.
    • Finally, I got another reason to solve problems in Clojure.

Talks

  • I was in Track 2, so I only got to listen to things that are happening there.
  • Demystifying Artificial Intelligence: A Beginner’s Guide to Smart Machines
    • Dr. U. Sabura Banu gave this talk.
    • How to solve problems around us using simple devices and tools.
    • Examples given by the mam are very interesting.
  • Dissect, Build Network packets
    • Rengaraj, one of the organisers of chennaipy community, gave this talk.
    • Scapy is an excellent tool. He demonstrated what we can do with this.
  • A day in the open source world
    • Bowrna Prabhakaran gave this talk.
    • Impressed by her story and phonetic search support for the Tamil story
    • I think we can use this to create a cheap autosuggestion for the editor
      • If anyone is interested, ping me.
  • Speed It Up! Building Efficient Indexes in MongoDB
    • Naveen Kumar gave this talk.
    • He went all out with this talk.
    • I never thought talking about indexes would be this interesting.
    • Interactive Quiz using Open source tool at the end is super cool.
  • Building Web with Batteries Included.
    • Namma Hari gave this talk, FossUnited organiser
    • He gave a demo about creating a website on https://frappe.io/
    • I can't explain this software in words, damn this thing is crazy.
    • Building SAS software in minutes is mind-blowing.
    • Dhanasekar, the previous ilugc co-ordinator, gave a demo about this in Kanchilug but Hari took it to the next level.
    • He asked if the crowd is not big, we can do a workshop. Wish I had said yes to him.

Conference

Pros

  • Met a lot of old and new friends at this conference.
  • Stickers
    • we decided which sticker to print so got firefox, vlc, blender, ..
    • Also tons of sticker from stalls but not able to get few.
    • My laptop has no room for stickers now.
  • Got my own hard copy of the book Dhuruvangal.
    • Gave my copy to my college friend to read.
  • Invited my brothers for this event, they too enjoyed the event.
  • Conducted Selfhosting workshop with salman over a huge crowd (I never did that before :p).
    • Conducting workshop with more than one member helps us identify and address the issue properly.
    • So next time i am doing workshop i plan on doing it with more people.
    • It also help us with crowd control and resolve their problems quickly.

Cons

  • Not able to attend few talks
    • As i was handling one of the track i am not able to listen to talks that are happening in other track.
  • Only had a few time to roam around the stall so i took bunch of photo but not able to talk to lot of them.
  • Day 2 was more tough, i missed meeting few people who came to the conference.
  • I felt the crowd control was bit off now and then but worked out in the end.
  • Sometimes we felt we have fewer volunteers, especially during lunch.

Overall i learned a lot and i am honoured that i get to take part in Tamil Nadu's only Tamil based Open Source conferenece.