FOSSASIA 2019 in Singapore

I attended FOSSASIA earlier this month. This conference has been on my radar for many years but I never managed to attend before.

I was impressed by the organization of the conference. Furthermore, I liked that the audience was completely different to the conferences I normally attend. There were so many new people. FOSSASIA has grown not just to be a conference, but also an umbrella organization for several open source projects.

I gave a talk about open source culture, using Debian as an example. I find this type of presentation important because this is where a lot of pitfalls are for many new contributors. Learning technologies is easy, but figuring out all the unwritten norms and rules of a community can be daunting. Of course, it was particularly interesting to give this talk in an environment where I'm the cultural outsider. While I've visited a number of Asian countries, there's a lot about the different cultures I have yet to learn.

I met a number of Debian contributors, including Andrew Lee, Norbert Preining (who talked about TeX Live), Graham Williams (who used to contribute to Debian in the early days and heads an AI team at Microsoft in Singapore now), Kai Hendry (who used to contribute to Debian) and others. I also spent some time away from the conference to write my DPL platform.

Thank you to Hong Phuc Dang, Mario Behling and all the other organizers and volunteers for a wonderful event!