Shaastra

In India, we have 16 premier engineering institutes. They go by the name of IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), and are considered one of top engineering colleges in India.

In a couple of hours, I’ll be flying down to IIT Madras to attend their annual technical festival: Shaastra. I’ve been invited to conduct a hackfest, whose primary objective would be to introduce people to the world of KDE. From what I know, there are 25 people signed up right now.

By the looks of it this 3 day hackfest (29th September - 1st October) is going to be amazingly exhausting and rewarding. If there any KDE developers in Chennai, please stop by! I could use your help.

Apart from me (KDE), we have Yuvi Panda coming on behalf of Wikimedia. Yuvi is also a GNOME developer who works on Cheese. Additionally we have a developer from Drupal, and a hardware hacker who is going to help everyone twist some wires with Arduino.

What to expect

My main focus is going to be bug fixing, so I’m on a lookout for simple bugs that can be fixed by new comers. So far I’ve made a list of around 15 bugs. Quite a few of them are from my note taking application, Notably. So far, I have junior jobs from Telepathy, Nepomuk, Soprano, Yakuake, Choqok(maybe), and Parley. If anyone knows any simple bugs or Junior Jobs, please let me know.

I doubt this event will be as big as conf.kde.in was. But I’m still hoping to get quite a few Indian students involved with KDE.

I’ve already prepared a virtual box instance which runs KDE trunk, so they should be able to skip the initial hassle of setting up a KDE Development environment.

Lets see how it goes :)