Hi everyone,
I recently got the chance to present at the first Ubucon India, hosted at IISc Bangalore, and it was a great experience.
My talk was inspired from a real issue I ran into while setting up Launchpad. I walked through how LXD can make development environments much easier to manage, especially when combined with tools like lxd-imagebuilder and cloud-init.
There were plenty of talks from fellow Canonical folks too,
covering Debian packaging, tooling on Ubuntu for developers, documentation, UX design, and chiselled images and rocks, which definitely caught the attention of the security crowd.
I also attended a workshop on using Ray to scale AI infrastructure and got to see how IISc is applying it in their projects. Qualcomm showcased their new DragonWings edge devices, tailored for AI workloads and running on Ubuntu. Another standout session focused on the rapidly evolving open source chip design ecosystem.
The audience was a fun mix of students and professionals, and I had a great time interacting with them. I also got to chat with a few core devs and hear their interesting core-dev interview stories. A lot of people were curious when I mentioned Juju and charms, especially those into self-hosting, and it sparked quite a few good follow-up discussions.
The IISc campus was amazing, every hall felt like it carried its own bit of history, including stories of the Nobel laureates who once walked the same corridors. The pin boards were filled with custom xkcd-style comics made by students, adding a fun, quirky touch. Walking through spaces where so much research has taken shape, and then getting to present in one of those rooms myself, was a pretty special feeling.
Huge thanks to the organisers, volunteers, and the whole Ubuntu community for putting together such a warm, energetic, and well-run event. Being the very first Ubucon in India, it will definitely strengthen and grow the Ubuntu community here in the years to come.
