What to expect at GNUnify – Pune’s biggest open source conference – 11/12 Feb

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GNUnify is possibly India’s biggest open source conference and it is happening in Pune on 11th and 12th February. The schedule (day 1, and day 2) is up and there’s a lot of interesting stuff.

There are workshops, talks, labs, and a wikipedia track. Here are what we believe are the highlights:

  • Workshops: There’s one workshop on efficient numerical computing with Scilab, and another on data visualization with R. Data visualization, data analysis and in general number crunching will be one of the most important activities of all software development in the next 5 years, so this is something that people should take an interest in. For beginners, there’s a two-day workshop on building websites quickly with drupal. And the ‘Beginning with Python’ workshop is another one you should take an interest in because python is a great language to learn and use. (There are also workshops on firewalls, GCC, C+Linux, and LaTeX that you can check out.)

  • Talks: there’s a bunch of talks on security, so anybody interested in this area has a good choice. Understanding Firewalls. Linux Hardening. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing. For the systems hackers there’s embedded systems design and development, there’s virtual networks various linux utilities, and linux kernel debugging. There’s lots to choose from for people in the application layer too: harnessing the poewr of sms for your web portal, Android native development, data visualization. There are a bunch of talks on mediawiki (the software that runs wikipedia) and Mozilla. And a talk on Haskell – one of the most interesting programming languages that you could learn today.

And remember, many of these talks are not by local Pune people; a lot of the speakers are travelling from outside Pune, and in fact, from outside India for these talks. So, if you miss these talks, you will not get a chance to hear them again for a long time.

And even after that long laundry list of talks that I’ve mentioned, there are a whole lot of other talks, labs, and workshops that I’ve missed out. So take a look at the GNUnify website and register to attend.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here