Last week I took some vacation time from work and went down to Bangalore to present a session on FOSS communities at Open Source India. It was such a wonderful experience, wow! India is electric. If you want to meet thousands of CS students and talk about Java, go to India! I have a lot of experience mixing with students over the years doing OpenSolaris projects in India, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and China. I really love it. They teach me every time!
Open Source India
At Open Source India I talked about some lessons I’ve learned from building FOSS communities over the years at Sun, Oracle, and also on my own. Most of the recent content I presented came from Java, of course, since I work at Oracle on the Java Developer Relations team. But I’ve participated in many Open Source communities (Linux, OpenSolaris, MySQL, NetBeans, JXTA, BarCamp, OpenOffice, and others) over the years, so I tried to weave in many stories and experiences from those groups. I tend to focus on telling stories about developers I’ve met over the years and who I’ve photographed and interviewed. So, my presentation is unique in that it’s based on personal experience. And I talk mostly about contributing, which is the most important process that keeps Open Source communities growing and provides the most opportunities for developers. I think things went over pretty well. After I got off the stage many people came up to chat, and we just continued our conversations from earlier in the day and the previous day. That’s the “hallway” track and it’s probably the most important part of any tech conference.
The conference drew about 5K people (see official event images) with a nice mix of professional developers and computer science students. I had so many conversations with students, which was really amazing. They are so bright, eager to learn, and enthusiastic about the future. Many of them are taking Java in school now or will be soon. I tried to stress that they shouldn’t overlook Java but instead they should take as much Java as they could. Java is vastly more advanced these days, and it’s much easier to learn than it was previously. The engineering team at Oracle has taking seriously the issue of getting new and young developers coding in Java and making the onramp easier — see Java 25 here, here, here and inside.java, dev.java, and learn.java. I also told them to build their portfolio now while they are in school by contributing to Open Source projects. This way they can build a professional network early, and they’ll have concrete contributions to show future employers during interviews. Don’t wait! I told them about the conversations I’ve had with about a hundred Java developers in recent years for my podcast Duke’s Corner, which is the most valuable project I work on at Oracle.
Below are some posts on LinkedIn about Open Source India from people I met there. It’s truly touching to read such nice comments from everyone I met based on our conversations at the conference and my presentation. And some of these posts have hundreds of interactions, so that demonstrates that the developer community is thriving in India on social media. It makes sense to engage these developers when they are in school to talk about Java and the opportunities this technology offers for their future.
LinkedIn Posts
Sohail Haldar, Anish Chatterjee, Janarthanan Muthu, Sharat Chander, Solomon Mark, Jim Grisanzio, Balaji Rajendran, Nandita Mahesh, Open Source India, S Sandhya, Aishwarya Amin, Renuka Jagtap, Sanjay Jha, Sohail Haldar, Surendra Narayan, Surendra Narayan, Shan Kuriakose, Sunil Kumar, Open Source India, Jim Grisanzio, Sharat Chander, Yugesh K
JavaFest Bangalore
Also, a few days after Open Source India, the Bangalore Java User Group ran their annual conference, JavaFest, in collaboration with eight other JUGs across India. I pitched JavaFest in my session at Open Source India and I’ve been helping promote and support the event in collaboration with our Oracle engineering team in India. Hopefully some day I’ll get to speak at JavaFest as well. See two popular posts on LinkedIn from Praveen Mohan and Jayashree S Kumar from the Oracle India Developer Center in Bangalore covering JavaFest. Praveen and Jayashree work in quality engineering, and their team also contributes extensively to the Bangalore Java User Group. Also, here’s an interview I did with Praveen previously where he talks about Java quality engineering and the local community in India. It’s nice to hear that the Oracle engineering team in Bangalore values direct interactions with the community.
I didn’t bring my good camera on this trip. But I did take some selfies with my phone. See them on Flickr.
A quick note on my presentation: The pdf has about 50 source links so be sure to click on them for more.
My next trip to India will be in April 2026 for the Great International Developer Summit (GIDS). I’m really looking forward to that trip too. I bet there will be many enthusiastic CS students there as well. But whereas the Open Source India presentation was on FOSS generally, my presentation for GIDS will be exclusively on Java. Can’t wait. Cheers