Day 3: The first day of the main conference. We thought we were running late (left home only at 09:50 after getting our Gentoo T-Shirts on) but the inauguration ceremony started half-hour late (as usual!) so we were able to catch the whole action. After FOSS.IN/2007 was kicked off by Atul & Kishore, Naba Kumar came up to give the keynote on Anjuta DevStudio. I didn’t know the origin of the name Anjuta earlier, but it was certainly fascinating.

I had my talk on contributing to Gentoo right after the keynote, and we started at 11:30 on the dot (the schedules in other rooms were on-time). Gora gave an excellent introduction, and I began speaking to a somewhat-filled room about the different entry points to Gentoo development. The audience were really interactive and the questions were brilliant - this is something that I really liked about this years edition of FOSS.IN. There was a lot more interest in Gentoo than I had originally anticipated and it was nice to see our stall really crowded immediately after the talk. Hopefully, we’ve brain-washed atleast two-dozen people into using Gentoo.

The remainder of the day was spent talking to people who approached our stall - it got a bit monotonous though, answering the same question “Why is Gentoo different?” over and over again. We’ve decided to print out an FAQ poster and put it up to make things a little more easier for us ;)

I had my third talk on Plan 9 from Bell Labs scheduled in the evening, right beside some really interesting stuff including the talk on PulseAudio and the lightning talk session. Again, I really didn’t expect much of a crowd for my talk, but I was happily mistaken. The room was not only full, but there were also people seated on the stairs and near the door! The talk went off really well, and I think it was the best talk I’ve delivered so far. The crowd was really smart and it was fun to interact with such an audience.

We’ve planned to have a small Mozilla hack-a-thon today, let’s see how that goes. Besides that I’ve planned to attend a few other interesting talks. Looking forward to keeping the pace up, I’ll catch you all tomorrow!