Why you should be at conf.kde.in
conf.kde.in is happening in Bangalore from 9th-13th March. This is a golden opportunity for students to have fun and learn some really interesting things that no college or class can teach. It is also a chance to form friendships that last forever.
If you don’t like long posts: here is the gist.
- Short term benefits – a great time and a cool t-shirt.
- Long term benefits – create something awesome, lots of friends and an impressive CV that recruiters will notice.
Remember that feeling you had the first time you made a paper boat all by yourself and set it on the water? Or the time when you sang really well on stage and a hundred people gave you a standing ovation? With KDE, its possible to create beauty everyday!
When I first started using Linux in 2004, KDE 3.2 was an eye-opener about what truly functional and powerful computing could be. It was liberating. But the real magic of KDE is in its people, highly talented, motivated and very warm individuals with a lot of free hugs. So come and join the community. You don’t have to be a top-grade programmer, a really great designer or a Indian language expert to enter. At KDE we welcome everybody who has the passion to improve the computing experience for millions of people.
If you are a programmer, at conf.kde.in you have a chance to take away intimate knowledge about working with technologies like Qt, a cross-platform library which allows you to create high-quality applications on Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Symbian and even Android. With so much web and social and information, you might want to make use of KDE’s excellent Nepomuk framework to create semantically aware apps that can look at things like humans. Or the lab sessions will have you get started with submitting bug fixes for KDE in no time.
If drawing and painting is your forte, we have sessions to get you contributing your skills to open source applications and improving the KDE look and feel. You could create the next UI paradigm and dominate the world! :)
A billion people are waiting to use computers, and one of the things stopping them from having cheap, affordable machines is the lack of English literacy. So if you know more than one language, you could jump in and translate applications to Indian languages and bring a smile to some kid, and make his future!
Don’t think that as a student you lack the qualifications to attend. A HUGE chunk of KDE is made of students, with even teenage contributors! I myself am just a 3rd year undergraduate. We encourage students through programs like Google Summer of Code, Season of KDE and Google Code-In for high-school students. conf.kde.in is here to guide you even if you have never programmed before. We have excellent talks for all levels, by notable members of the KDE community. We also have interactive lab sessions where you will get to hack and explore more code than you will ever do in your college courses :P
Make sure you drag along your teachers too. They can be introduced to the educational tools that make KDE such a great platform to learn new things on. Whether its astronomy or jigsaw puzzles or Ph. D. level computer courses, KDE has applications for them to make their teaching more tangible!
Student passes are Rs. 500 (for all 3 days, including lunch), teachers can register for Rs. 700. For others its Rs. 900. Register online before 25th February to attend conf.kde.in. Although you can register after that, even on the spot at the day of the conference, it will be more expensive later (Students: Rs. 700, Teachers: Rs. 900, Normal: Rs. 1200). Remember to enter discount codes to get a discount, and get your college ID card to the event.
- Student discount: KDEIN_DIS_STU
- Teacher discount: KDEIN_DIS_TCR
If you need a letter to get permission from your college, we can arrange that.
PS. If you can get a laptop with Linux on it to conf.kde.in, you can have twice the fun :)
