This month, i.e., April, 2015, I started working for Idea Device Technologies as a Member of Technical Staff. I will be mostly working on backend stuffs here and help build scalable tools for infrastructure automation. Idea Device is mostly a Python shop using Pyramid, gevent, etc. to the fullest apart from other awesome technologies. However, its not just the tech stack that got me attracted towards Idea Device, the folks that make Idea Device as well. ...

fedocal 0.13 release makes it possible for anyone to download iCal file for a meeting and brings support for client side notifications. You can do this in the following ways: Click on a meeting in fedocal In the meeting modal/page, click on the iCal export link to download iCal file for that particular meeting. You can also export iCal file for the meeting with reminder info in by checking the reminder checkbox beside the iCal export link, and then clicking on the iCal export link. Once you have downloaded the iCal file for the meeting, you can import the iCal file using Evolution in Gnome 3. ...

We resumed our monthly meetups in Bangalore on the March 7, 2015. We’ve now decided to hold Fedora meetup in Bangalore on the 1st Saturday of every month. Here’s link to our event on Fedora Calendar: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/calendar/meeting/2036/. We met at Starbucks Coffee, Indiranagar. at 6 PM. It was good place to chat and had free wifi internet too. We were 4 people. We discussed on: upcoming Fedora 22 release contributing to testing Fedora 22 images contributing to Fedora Infra We were also having some discussions on #fedora-apps on Freenode during the meetup regarding various tasks we’re handling and brainstorming on new ideas. The folks in the meetup also found Kushal Das’s worknotes very handy to get started with testing of Fedora cloud images. The discussions were not just limited to Fedora. We also shared the cool things we have been working on at our workplaces, new technologies: reactjs, meteorjs, polymer, golang, etc. ...

Today, I migrated my blog: http://www.rtnpro.com to Ghost. I was previously writing blogs and maintaining my static blog website using Nikola. I like Nikola for being a very featureful and powerful static blog generator. I find the ReStructuredText format handy when generating complex HTML, and especially, I fell in love with the custom RST shortcuts provided by Nikola. But, flexibility breeds complexity. Why migrate? A blog post should be simple and easily renderable in blog aggregators. When you do too much custom HTML/CSS stuff in your post, e.g., playing grid layout of Twitter bootstrap, etc. things break. When you start using a lot of custom things provided by a static blog generator like Nikola, migration becomes a pain. Luckily, I had just started to use Nikola specific RST shortcuts. You want to write blogs, and not code. It was a pain to migrate to newer versions of Nikola. Usually, it involved a lot of fiddling with the conf files, sometimes the source code as well. I kinda like WYSIWYG, and especially web based editors accessible from anywhere over the internet. The final blow was my nikola based blog’s RSS feed not being parsed by the planet aggregator: https://github.com/rubys/venus used by Fedor planet, DGPLUG planet, etc. For a second, I thought, I can write a patch to fix wherever the bug is. But then, enough is enough. I want to write blog posts and not code each time to do it. Migration Installed ghost plugin in my wordpress blog and exported all content in a format ghost understands Installed ghost on local machine Signup and enter the admin dashboard Import blog posts from my wordpress blog Migrate RST blog posts from Nikola to Ghost Once everything looked fine, I installed ghost on my http://www.rtnpro.com server Exported all local ghost content and imported that in my ghost instance for http://www.rtnpro.com Rsync’d all the local images from content/images/ to the remote server Setup supervisord to run ghost on my server as a daemon Added nginx rules to allow access to all public pages of www.rtnpro.com over HTTP and blocked access to admin pages at http://www.rtnpro.com/ghost/. I’ve configured another nginx virtual host to allow access to the admin pages over HTTPS. Migration was not that painful as I was expecting it to be. It took me a few hours for doing the entire migration. I am liking Ghost’s simplicity and the admin dashboards and the web editor for writing blog posts. ...

Last Saturday, on Jan 10, 2015, we had a Fedora 21 release party in Bangalore. It was held in the premises of Red Hat, Bangalore with the help and support of Archit and Humble, who are working at Red Hat, Bangalore. Registration for the event started from around 9:30 AM and slowly people started dropping in. Over 40 people had turned up for the event. We started the event at around 10:30 AM with Archit giving an introduction about Fedora. ...

Today, we had a Fedora meetup in Bangalore, at HackerEarth’s office. Although, there were only 4 attendees including ourselves: myself, Sayan, Ashwin and Puneet, we made the most out of the meetup. The meetup lasted from morning 11 AM to around 3 PM. Following is a summary of our activities during the meetup: Discussed about the upcoming Fedora 21 release Planning for a release party for Fedora 21 in Bangalore Ashwin shared his knowledge on embedded systems Puneet knows C++, so, we asked Puneet to start working with KDE and Qt A few bugfixes in fedora-infra: pkgdb2 and FMN Planning for a Fedora and open source orientation event in Ashwin’s college It was great to meet with like minded folks interested in technology and Open Source and hack with them. We are looking forward to have similar meetups every month. We envision these Fedora meetups to be a place where people can join and share knowledge, and hack on cool Open Source projects.

try.waartaa.com has been live since January, 2014. We have got quite some signups and some folks actively using Waartaa. Thanks to our code level optimizations, which has led to storage complexity for channel chat logs dependent only number of unique channels being listened to. We’re also able to achieve good real time performace in our demo instance with ever growing chat logs. It’s time to publish some stats about our demo instance. ...

It was great that our proposal to speak on Waartaa at Flock, 2014 was accepted. So, I, along with Sayan went to Prague, Czech Republic last week to attend Flock. Flock was a 4 day event packed with loads of talk and workshops. It was like living in a dream at Flock. I was able to meet so many great people from the Fedora and Open Source community. Day 1 ...

What is Waartaa? Waartaa or wārtā is a word in Hindi: वार्ता, which means to communicate. And that’s what waartaa is for. Waartaa is a web based IRC client as a service and it facilitates centralized logging, idling functionality, unique identification across multiple clients and a rich UI for awesome user experience. Waartaa is open sourced under MIT License. The source is at https://github.com/waartaa/waartaa/ .You can download, fork, customize and setup Waartaa as a service anywhere, be it a single user laptop/desktop, server for your self and your friends. ...

I have been contributing to Mozilla for some time now and so, I got the opportunity to attend Mozilla Summit 2013 at Santa Clara. Contributors from all around the globe turned up to attend the Summit which was going in parallel in 3 places: Santa Clara, Brussels and Toronto. Finally, I met Mathjazz at the Summit. We had been working for a long time on Pontoon and were communicating over the internet. Not only did I meet Mathjazz, but his Mozilla team from Slovenia. We had some discussions on Pontoon and it’s roadmap. I attended the i18n and l10n discussions led by Axel from Mozilla and got more insight into the process. I had some discussion with Axel on plans to integrate l20n with Django and Python in general. It did not seem that straight forward. Axel asked me to get in touch with @jezdez on this. ...