OSDC Nordic 2015

After I finished the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) or now is known as Outreachy program in August 2014, I moved to Germany to study my master degree.  I was busy with my first semester of study, so unfortunately that I didn't have much time to do coding or participate in any Open Source or Perl community event. Now, I sorted everything out and I'm full of energy to actively contribute to Open Source community again. I looked for a conference to update new technology about Perl and other Open Source projects and it will be a good chance to get to know new local community which closes to me.

I decided to attend the Open Source Developers' Conference(OSDC) Nordic 2015 which was held on May 8-10th, 2015 in Oslo, Norway. This is the first time that OSDC conference was held in a Nordic country. Some people asked me why I chose to to come to Norway for this conference and I have many reasons that I think I shouldn't miss this conference which are ...

• This conference was organized by Oslo Perl Mongers and Nordic Perl Workshop was included to be a part of this conference.
• Since this is ODSC conference, so there're a lot of sessions from other Open Source groups of technology which I can attend. This is a good chance for me to learn the new technology from people on that community that I never experienced before.
• All of the talks in the event are in English.
• Oslo isn't far from my residence so I don't have to travel for a long time because I still class every week.

My one of my impression for this conference is not only I can get promotion code as a student but also anyone can ask for promotion code if they are actively member of any Open Source community. This is really kind of the organizers!

OSDC.no Day 1 : Pre conference/ A panel debate

I arrived Oslo in the afternoon, after had a little city sight-seeing I headed to the bar for the pre conference. I was so happy to see Abigail -- a friend from a Perl community, last time we met each other at YAPC::Asia in Tokyo and we meet again in another conference in another part of the world. This is one of reasons why I like a conference -- this is an event to bring people who have the same interests from around the world together. 

There was a panel debate by Simon Phipps(of OSI fame), Patrick Michaud(Perl 6 language designer), Mark Burgess(Creator of Cfengine) and Christer Gundersen(Open Source evangelist) all of them have been working on Open Source firms for decades with a lot of experience. They had debate, discussion and answer questions about the world of Open Source like what are key factors of successful or failed Open Source project,  how a company contributes Open Source and about Open Source community and more. I was a bit tired from a long journey since early morning but the topic of discuss and the relaxed environment at the bar made it be joyful evening. 

OSDC.no Day 2

Started the day by Norwegian coffee and a lot of fruit, I think this is kind of Norwegian culture to server these things for guests.

After the conference opening by Salve, the was the very interesting talk on the main hall about Open Source in the topic Open Source and Flexibility. The very good thing that it happened in the main hall without any other talks in other halls. After the first talk, it was the hard part of the conference which is choosing the room from for talks from each community. There were 3 rooms divided by group of technologies which are:

• The main hall for topics about about Open Source and other small groups of technology
• Nordic Perl Workshop room 
• Civic Hacking room

As a Perl Hacker my first interest is always about Perl, so I wanted to attended the Nordic Perl Workshop room but I was a bit hesitate because the talks from other group of technology are also interesting for me. After check the list of the talks on that day. I decided to attend only the Perl room since there were a lot of topics that I couldn't bear missing them. There were 4 talks on that day and I attended all of them. I like all of the talks even though some of them are a bit hard to understand for me because I never had much chance to use that method in practical way like Perl 6 and others and  I learn a lot of new technology from those talks. 

OSDC.no Day 3

The first talk of me and the conference was a talk about Open Source development by Patrick Michaud and then we moved the room of one's area of interest. That day, I thought I would like to try to learn new things from technology community then decided to join the main hall with topic about Frida, a dynamic code instrumentation toolkit made in Norway. It was the first time that I heard about that and it let me know know how far it goes in the world of Open Source. I had some free time when a talk finished earlier and then I had a chance to talk with Salve in person about his experience in organizing the conference. We shared experience about how to organize the conference and what is the idea of starting OSDC in Oslo and obstacles of it. It recalled me about when we set up Bangkok.pm meet up. It was the first time meet up we couldn't expect much about number of participants we just wanted to show that we could do that and urge more people to join. In the afternoon, I join the sessions about general topics in Open Source in the main hall. I specially like one talk in the topic Teach Kids Code, I like the idea to teach kids how to programming since they are young because I like programing and I wish to see more and more generations in the cyberspace and innovate new things for the world.

Finally, we came to the end of the conference, everyone was in the main hall there were some light talks. The conference is closed simply by Salve and thank you stuffs for hard working.

My accomplishment and motivation

From this conference, I have learned not only Perl programming technology but also other Open Source technologies. I got to know more people from other Open Source communities. I realized myself that I shouldn't stick with just one technology of community but I can join other group because people in the world of Open Source they are also nice and welcome new member. I have learned how to develop both the software itself as well as the community in the same time. I got some more idea in the way to improve my ability to contribute to FOSS, I should have more communication with local community here, take a part in community event or help to organize sometime I found that there're so many people who are looking to join an event but the problem that we still have few people to volunteer to organize the event. If I can't be an organizer then whenever I attend the event I should try to be a speaker. This time at OSDC, I also wanted to give the talk but since I didn't do much coding then I'm a bit lost from new technology and also busy with study, so I didn't have much interesting thing to share.  Next time I should be more prepared and give some talks to share something about my currently work which I just started recently. Hopefully, I can make it happens in the future very soon.

Group Photo by: Wendy

A Newbie is Sent in YAPC::ASIA

I had a chance to attend YAPC::ASIA as a Send-a-Newbie awardee from the Enlightened Perl Organisation (EPO). It was the first time that the awardee is sent the the Perl event in Asia. The event was held on August 28-30, 2014 in Tokyo, Japan.

It also was the first time for me to attend the event outside the country and in the country that I can't speak their local language(I used to take 2 Japanese course but I almost forget it all since I didn't use it). 

The first person who I expected to meet is Ribasushi (Peter Rabbitson) since he was only EPO member in the event. I guessed he might be well known among Perl/CPAN developers but I confess that I didn't know him before (because I'm a really newbie) :D

Finally we met, in the line to check in thank you that he was very noticeable (a long hair guy).

Big thanks to the organizer for free ticket for student as I'm studying in a master degree. I've got student for 3 days of the event but I didn't get event goodies anyway.

YAPC::ASIA Day 0

The event started in the evening, all of the talks are in Japanese I knew from the schedule I also met Daisuke Maki here, it seemed he has known me already since he was one of organizers that I was a newbie awardee to this event.

I had a small talk I feel that I got warning from him that all the talks are in Japanese but I doesn't problem at all! I can understand some from the slide and I like to be in the event to see how the event goes. I did talk only with Non-Japanese guys – Sawyer X and Abigail. Funny that I think I was only a female hacker in the hall I hope could see more Japanese Perl hackers.

Seem the interesting part is the night in the pub. Thanks beer that helps shy Japanese be more talkative . I had some conversation with some Japanese people I think they understand what I said but they couldn't reply much anyway I got a lot of apologize from them that they aren't good at English even I think I didn't deserve it but I understand that that was a Japanese thing.

YAPC::ASIA Day 1

I got a bad starting in this day, I caught the wrong train – the express train didn't stop at Hiyoshi station which is opposite to the venue. So I missed the opening :(. I attended classes which English is used from speaker and slide subtitle like class from Abigail, Dan Kogai, Ribasushi and Googod (Kang-min Liu) etc.

A lovely thing is I got Bento (Japanese lunch box), I think this is very asian thing that I didn't know it also happen in Japan. In Thailand, we always provide lunch box in any event.

I also met Karen Pauley at noon while I'm having lunch in the garden nearby. It was a nice meeting! She is really nice and friendly.

Unfortunately, that I didn't know about signing for the dinner that night so I missed the dinner as well as the free beer in the bar cause it fill-filled by people. Seem that day wasn't my day but I got of fun with people though.

YAPC::ASIA Day 2

This day most of the talks in the morning are in Japanese. I attended some classes and enjoy talking with people around the event. I met some people who bought only 1 day ticket, had a talk with Fiona – a recruiter from booking.com I feel like I was persuaded to work for booking.com (lol) event if I didn't talk to her booking.com is one of the company that I like to work with and I would apply for sure if I didn't have to study. There was a lot of interesting class today as always I attended a class from Sawyer X, Andy Delcambre and FUJU Goro etc.

In the afternoon, I've got a bag T-shirt and souvenirs with the magic of Ribasushi. I don't know how he got it. I hope that he didn't anything illegal to bring me these stuffs ;)

However, big thanks to Ribasushi for that. It was a really nice of him!

This is my personal perspective about this event and what I have learn so far. Please leave me any comment if there's any point I misunderstand.

What I like:

• I like all of the talks I have attend they are really useful to me to learn to improve my technical skill
• I met so many cool people and got to learn a lot from them
• The event was really nice with well organized, I learnt about how to event is set up and hopefully I can make it happens in Thailand at least in Bangkok.pm
• A lot of food, drink and snack :D

• The venue is good to access (if you aren't lost from Japanese train like me)

What I don't like:

• Most of the talks are in Japanese without English sub-title
• No English audio translation from Japanese. Anyway I know from Daisuke Maki that it costs a lot of money for that and there weren't so much attendees who knows or use English. It isn't worth it.
• The venue is a bit too small for number of attendees and I think the organizer is aware of that

What could be better:

• News on the official are also in Japanese, that would be great if there's also English version at least some information that we should know
• I think slide in sub-title would be really helpful. I think we should try to help speakers to translate slide this way maybe cheaper than English audio

However, I knew that most of the talks are in Japanese but there are still some of talks in English. I'm aware of that point I sent an email to Yusuke Wada about the languages which are used in the event before I wrote the proposal to go to YAPC::ASIA. I realize that the organizer also try to convince people who uses English to come to event by invite English speakers. I think we shouldn't let the language to be the wall to obstruct us by not going to this event because we have to same language which is Perl language. As I wrote on my application to Send-A-Newbie program, I wanted to participate in YAPC is not only because I want to meet cool Perl hackers and attend their talks but also I want to see how the event goes, how to set up and organize in such a big event. I have a dream that YAPC::ASIA will be like YAPC::EU or YAPC::NA that the host or organizers is rotated every years in each country in Asia. I wish Bangkok.pm and Perl developers and host YAPC one day eventually.

What I have learn so far is I realize myself that I'm really newbie for the Perl community. I met a lot of people, listened and acknowledged about what they said but I couldn't have anything to response or give them back because I never have experience about. I should be more 'giver' because I was given a lot. For example, I didn't have much technical skill about CPAN since I'm not a CPAN author and never have module released.  I'm a Perl user I used Perl module to solve my business problem but I never try to make a new module to share others. I got inspired to learn more and give more to this community.

Finally, big thanks to The Enlightened Perl Organisation for bringing me in YAPC::ASIA, Mark Keating and Ribasushi as a local representative from EPO. Thanks for free (student) ticket and well-organised from the organiser. Also, thank you all people I have met for a warm welcome and friendly environment.

OPW Ending for Beginning

The Outreach Program for Women #8 has been ended for days in August 18^th. This is probably my last work report. Although, the program is finished but my work hasn't finished yet not only because I got trouble of my internet connection for few days last week that result in I couldn't work much but also I want to keep working on MetaCPAN as a contributor and maintainer.

Last time I posted the proposal about changing search result page. I want to say thank you for those who donated their time and gave me a really helpful comments to improve this feature. I had an idea came up back and float there are some ideas to put the tab into horizontal on the left side which is almost the blank space now put this could cause confusing and not so good appearance in mobile version. So, I'm work on the design to make UI improvement display nicely in any devices. That feature is also my last task from OPW timeline.

For me the finishing program doesn't mean I should stop doing Perl or working MetaCPAN but I think it was just a milestone to set me more freedom to contribute more in other FOSS Projects. It's ending to start new thing for me. What I plan to do after OPW are

• I'm going to join YAPC::ASIA in the end of this month and surely I will share you the event report after I'm back to Thailand on this blog please still follow my blog and my post if you like to see. I will also travel a little while in Japan after the event finished.
• I'm looking for a freelance work I'm trying to take a part in more project what I'm interested in now is DuckDuckGo from to my passion in search engine technology. Also any other FOSS prjects, please let me know if you know any of it I'm happy to help even it's a free work as long as it's cool project ;)
• I'm going to study in a master degree in Germany in October in the Clausthal University of Technology. It locates in northwestern Germany close to Hannover. See you Hannover.pm !

Finally, I want to say thank you to …

      The Perl Foundation to give me such a great chance to work on MetaCPAN.

      GNOME Foundation to establish this cool program.

      MetaCPAN and my mentors Randy Stauner, Olaf Alders and Thomas Sibley for your time to give me learning so many things.

      Contributors and users of MetaCPAN for your comments and suggestions to me in any issue I worked on and they're really useful for me learn in many perspectives.

Thank you so much !

Work report and sketch of new MetaCPAN result page.

Last week I worked on API Document reorganizing, it sounds simple but not for me because in order to arrange it we should understand the content especially technical content. I spent a while to understand the document and how the API works. Finally it has been done.

There're only 2 weeks left in my OPW program, I'm going to utilize my skill on a new feature of MetaCPAN. The new feature is introduce the new type-based search result page. The original idea is from issue #287 on metacpan-web. The idea is providing user search result in specific result data type. For example, display only distributions or authors which is relevant to the query on result page.

 I'm presenting the prospective search result page to be in tabs which contain each type of data e.g. distribution, modules and authors. This is the sketch to prove to idea:

I will appreciate with any suggestion or comment whether you like it or not. Please left the comment and discuss about this feature on Github. Thank you in advance ! 

This is quite a big change of MetaCPAN for me. I'm really excited with this task and I'm looking forward to implementing it. :D

Work report and a lovely story.

Most of my work in past 2 weeks is fix the existing issue and improve code quality.

I have 2 major tasks that needed to be done first which are Bootstrap upgrading and Open ID login.

The Bootstrap almost completely done waiting for code review but for the Open ID the I've got test failure that I can't solve it until now. It is a bit weird that first time when I implemented it I made the test function and proved it and it worked properly but it failed after I pushed to Github. That sounds crazy but it's real. I still keep fixing it with my mentor help.

I don't have any thing much too talk about my work since it's quite similar with last topic update and I still fix my code again and again.

I have a lovely story that I want to share. There was a girl came to ask me about how to contribute Open Source ( I think maybe she is reading this post). I was figuring out a while – this is an open question that has so many answers for me. For me I think the best way to get start is finding what we like to do. I think if we have a passion or inspiration on it that would be easy to get through it. I told her to find the Open Source project and trying to find the contributor or maintainer of the project. I'm sure that those people in the Open Source always be nice with a newbie as I have experienced and they could help her to get start. Of course I can help her to get start with Perl or MetaCPAN but since she is absolutely new I think she could choose which technology she likes to learn.

She wants to contribute to Open Source because she wants to make some small contribution before she can apply for the OPW program next round. Although, I think it's a bit too early to contract a mentor before the time of the application submission and we don't know yet which organizations are going to participate in next round and who volunteer to be mentors. However, be ready and well prepare is always more impressive. So just told her to prepare for the technology that organization is using and self study.

Overall, I want to share this story because I'm so impressed with her motivation and education in her environment. She is younger than me and she is still a student. I believe she will get 'multi-view' of study from the OPW which I didn't experience in my school life I would say. I think every program in the Open Source community – Google Summer of Code or The Outreach Program for Women are really cool program that I wish I have known that since I was in the university. It didn't happen anyway but I wish I could share this such a great program to Thai students to learn more and get involved in the Open Source community as I have been. I'm so happy that I have a chance to give that girl some advice and I hope in could do more. So if someone reading my blog please feel free to contract me to help even I'm also a newbie too! :)

Obstacle in half way of OPW.

Now, I have been working on week 8 of The Outreach Program for Women program with proposal to work on the index issue of MetaCPAN search. But my timeline a bit messed up now since the time block has been split into Bootstrap upgrading and fixing the broken as an effect from new Bootstrap.

I’m supposed to work on the new things but I cannot since I have to complete the current pull requests with fixing and cleaning a mess I made. 

For me, I think this is some kind of classic problems in software development life cycle — it’s hard to make the code perfect in the first solution especially when you lack of experience. Even that’s the best solution in that moment but may not last long. It still need be maintained, fixed and improved like an endless development. 

  

For me the difficult thing to be a programmer is when you have to ‘estimate' when the job will be done but the more difficult thing seems to be make it 'completely done' in the time you have estimated. We will never know whether the job is difficult or not until we work on that which I think it’s a challenge of programmer job that people like. 

However, we did estimate and we are overdue sounds better than no estimation and no goal. Then we could learn about our performance and speed in each job.

Bootstrap 3 migration and some funny ideas.

I have spending a week to upgrade Bootstrap from version 2 to 3, although it wasn’t in my original proposal but it is my new purpose to work on that because I think we could move to future and it is time consumed task resulted in no one has time to do it but now I’m working on it for full time. I could donate my time to do that. I really appreciate my mentors for a respect for my opinion and let me keep on doing that.

I got to learn a lot about Bootstrap’s stuffs even though I got  frustrated about it but I also enjoy doing to. I think the more frustration I got the more knowledge I have learn.

This issue urge me get PAUSE id since I need to have the ID to get MetaCPAN activated and finally I have it! I’m not sure whether it’s funny or not that I have coding Perl for about 2 years but I don’t have PAUSE account. My intention was if I have had inspiration to make some new module I would register for the PAUSE account. For me I think it’s funny to have it while I’m not really CPAN author.

In my programmer life I think I have an objective when I write the code that it should be ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ which are enough for productive work. However, one more thing I have learn recently from Open Source work and I should apply to my code is it should be ‘easy to read and understand’ as well. I realized that I never experienced this issue seriously before since I worked with the same colleagues in the same team for long while so we could understand each other coding style. But this is Open Source, programmer are from around the world even we’re coding the same language but it can result in many ways to do it. I think maybe that’s why TIMTOWTDI is extended to …  there’s more than one way to do it, but sometimes consistency is not a bad thing either (TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE) which I think I quite agree with that ;)