Quick update on the first day at FOSS.IN. We reached the venue at around 09:00 - the stalls were the first thing that caught my eye (especially the Sun & Google ones). After about 20 minutes of frantic organizers moving all over the venue at lightning speeds, all the speakers got registered and we moved to SDA/250 for the Mozilla PD.

We started a little late - around 10:30 as opposed to 10:00. After brief introductions by Mary, Myk kicked off the project day with an excellent overview of the add-on scenario in Mozilla. This was followed by Prasad’s talk on building applications on the Mozilla platform. The calculator example - complete with it’s own add-on manager (for adding scientific support) - was a great way of giving the basics of Mozilla application development as was the highlight of the tutorial.

I gave the next talk on writing add-ons with JavaScript using XPConnect. Prasad and Myk had already covered a lot of ground on the basics of add-on and application development, so I was able to wrap up my talk in about half an hour - bringing us right back on schedule ;)

The last talk of the first half was given by Mary which focussed on the various non-technical ways in which you could help Mozilla. The talk brought to light a lot of cool activities Mozilla was involved in. We broke for lunch at exactly 13:00, promising to meet back at 14:00 for the second half. Mary also kept a lot of Mozilla swag at the entrance of the hall - which included badges, mobile holders, tattoos, stickers and wrist bands. The crowd was ecstatic about them and needlessly to say that they were a great hit.

At lunch we caught up with a lot of other FOSS friends from #linux-india. Aanjhan transferred the Gentoo stickers which he kindly volunteered to print, and we hope to setup the Gentoo stall today so that we’re ready for tomorrow. I finally met G0SUB in real life, took me some time to recognize him because of the shaven beard though :)

Post lunch we began with Krishnakant’s talk on accessibility in Mozilla, which as Gora said was an eye-opener is many ways for all of us. I was really impressed with the level of accessibility that the Gnome environment and Mozilla Firefox provided to the disabled. We discussed some ways in which accessibility could improve in Mozilla applications.

The next talk was by Axel, which was about Localization in Mozilla. The coolest part of the talk was when Axel fixed a bug on localization (though it was ultimately closed as a WONTFIX!) because it gave a very good overview to the audience about the life-cycle of a bug. The final talk of the project day was by Chris Hoffman, which was about QA in Mozilla and how you can contribute to these areas which require some technical skills - “for people in the middle”.

We rounded off the project day with about an hour of one-on-one discussion with all the Mozilla folks, which was, in my opinion, the best part of the project day because we got to discuss a variety of topics (not only related to Mozilla or Technology even). We also decided to have a hack session for Mozilla, which would be tentatively on the 7th at the hack center.

After all the dust settled, we packed up around 18:30 and a group of around 12 went for dinner to “Sunny’s”, a nice Italian restaurant. Discussion on virtually everything ranging from food to movies and dtrace to macports ensued and we were done by around 21:00. After reaching home I just fell on my bed and now here I am, all geared up for FOSS.IN: Day 2! :)

Karunakar posted a few pics of Day 1 here, check them out.