Hell Oh Entropy!

A little over a year ago, FUDCon APAC happened in Pune. I know because I lost a lot of nights sleep over it. The event also marked a turning point in my life because it coincided with my decision to move on from Red Hat and accept an offer with Linaro, a decision that I can say now was among the best I have taken in my life despite the very difficult choice I had to make to leave arguably the best team one could ever work with. FUDCon also brought me in touch with many volunteers from across Asia and it was interesting to see the kinds of challenges they faced when talking about Fedora and Open Source in general. That was also when I got to know Nisa and Somvannda from Cambodia better, especially when I had the chance to go over to Phnom Penh for APAC budget discussions. They had wanted to do a FUDCon in Phnom Penh in 2015 and we simply put out a better bid then.

I was not as frustrated as I look in this picture. Photo by Kushal Das.

We started a new trend at last year’s FUDCon, where we held a discussion to decide and announce next year’s FUDCon date and location. We did not actually make an announcement to that effect, but we did have lots of discussions and in the end agreed to support Cambodia in its bid for 2016, especially with Sirko Kemter moving there and taking care of some of the logistics that we had concerns about.

So here we are a little over a year later and it looks like the Phnom Penh FUDCon is happening as planned, alongside Barcamp Phnom Penh. I was ambivalent about going, primarily because I was going to be away for a long time in September and I did not want to be without my family any longer - I love to travel, but there’s only so much time I can spend without my family. That problem is now solved since Nisha has been increasingly getting involved in Pyladies and python programming and wanted to be part of FUDCon as well. It’s going to be expensive, but hey, we deserve a vacation right?

Photo-op with the youngest participant at FUDCon. Photo by Kushal Das.

And an interesting vacation this promises to be with a planned visit to Siem Reap and then back to Phnom Penh to attend what is claimed to be the largest gathering in Phnom Penh. Nisha will be doing a talk on spatial mapping. I had done an impromptu workshop at FUDCon Pune in 2015, where an idle discussion on C programming turned into me showing a group of very interested students how a simple Hello World program gets translated into something that the machine understands and executes. I will attempt to make that into a more formal workshop at Phnom Penh.

So if you’re coming to FUDCon, I’ll see you there!