Coming to IndiaFOSS
My experience with FOSS
My first ever FOSS tool was OpenShot, when I started making my Youtube channel around building stuff in Arduino I needed a video editor. I had tried filmora, but I hated the watermark. I wanted something that is free, works well for my editing needs (stiching video and adding music). That when I came accross this term called FOSS, the free and open source, wait I can read the source code of it ?
Later down the line, I started learning game dev, then again Unity was the jazz. CodeMonkey, Brackeys and Dani all of them used it, but out there was Godot, the same "FOSS" term came back into my life.
After watching ThePrimeagen's video on how he works with window manager in linux. I was hooked, and converted my whole machine to linux, and vowed to use FOSS4Life.
3 years have passed since this, lately I began to question my ideals, are they even worth following. I started feeling lonely about my ideals the daemons running in my head started turning red. With frustrated mind, I came to IndiaFOSS 2026.
I felt that I am small, a tiny speck compared to others there, for the first time in my life I saw individuals that follow FOSS down to its core like Richard Stallman. This was an insane revelation for me. Dare I say this tiny speck belonged here.
Meeting People IRL
I met Adithya Nair and Nikhil Bharadwaj I knew them from ATLAS. Meeting them IRL was so cool, I wish I could talk more, but .. my social battery says otherwise :)
Meeting my teammates from Netstacc was so cool, this is the first time I saw their faces, crazy to think that I spent a month building something with them without even knowing their faces lol.
Talks
Begin part of a Prof. KC's talk , was so insanely cool. His talk on creating the notebook for fp launchpad him using a combination of Ocamls tools were cool. It really shows how cool OCaml ecosystem is.
Prof. Mohit's talking on creating COSH, genuinely made me both happy for them and envious of them. Them being able to get a draft in IETF is soooooo cool.
Abhas Abhinav's talk on liberating CCTVs, made me question my entire infra, and how I can start working on liberating them.
Panel Discusion @ Open Hardware was so fun, I was a bit late to join it and I regret that deeply. But for the few minutes I was there. You really could feel how much they love their craft. Them talking about projects that have been on their desk for 2 months without touching them, felt so relatable, but then realising that it was good to take a time off was liberating.
Navaneeth Nambiar's, talk on benchmarking Ocaml was cool, again envious of OCaml ecosystem these guys are building. I really want to work with OCaml after these talks :-:
serv0id's talk on how he reverese-engineered the PAN qr code was so cool, and his process of figuring it out was interesting. The term dynamic analysis was new to me. I really want to do a LR(Literature Review) on that :)
Booths
The folks at the Bruno were so cool to interact with, I asked them what it was, expecting a simple answer like bruno is xyz. But they walked me through the whole need for even having Bruno. If I ever have a stall, I wish I will be able to have 80% of the energy that they showed to me one day :)
FreeBSD, I never realized what I missing out on. they walked me through what made FreeBSD special, how closely knit their ecosystem was and they had a pin which I had to get :)
Processing Foundation, I got to know about the term "Creative Coder" from them. Seeing the L-system tree sim they made was cool.
I knew about P5js from The Coding Train
As always thanks to Akilan SS
