Deb's Blog

I'm not much of a new year resolution kind of person. I do what is needed, when it's needed, to get to where I need to be. But of late, I've found myself in an incredibly privileged position of having time, energy AND resources to do not only what I need to do, but also the things that I want to. I can play the video games I like, buy the things I like, travel the places I like - all these things I want to and more - without negatively affecting any of the things that I need to do (responsibilities of various forms). It hit me with a massive realization, that not many people - not only the ones alive in modern era, but even the ones that are now part of history - regardless of their power, riches or fame - have had this much amount of degrees of freedom & learning/growth opportunity in their lifetime. For that, I find myself to be incredibly fortunate, and that also makes me restless. Cause if I don't turn this opportunity into something useful, something worthy, wi...

I was about to go full epic-narrator mode , but I'm barely keeping it together. Subjectivity will creep in, can't help it at the moment. I _can_ still try to explain it in a succinct, bullet points, matter-of-fact way, but I'm choosing against it. So, it'll be a bit long winding story, unlike most of my posts. What I lost can't be downloaded, borrowed or recreated. There were one of each of those things, and now there aren't. I don't expect anyone else to 1:1 grasp how I feel about losing 4 years worth of hobby projects, things I brought to life to be no longer there - so, if you're like "yeah, not like anyone died... chill out & quit bickering about it" I don't really fault you for that. I don't have a pet; I wouldn't quite understand how losing a pet may feel either - compared to someone who does - at least not to the same extent. So, please excuse me while I write its obituary, cause I want this to stay as vivid of an example...

I recently bought this "car camera" as a cheesy way to get a decent sized display at a cheaper price. Most searches for displays for IoT/making end up in touch enabled puny screens, which are 3-10x the price of this entire unit. I don't care for touch, so I was happy to just "salvage" the display from this combo & the camera just becomes a bonus. However, giving it a try, I found out that it's a rather nice unit that works beautifully with minimal configuration as a closed circuit camera system, and it's pretty cheap for that purpose. I'm actually considering getting a few of them, and set up a full monitoring system. I'm just day dreaming about it in peace & quiet, meanwhile dad saw it & passed a comment: "Oh, is it a CCTV? does it record?" *Thanks dad, thanks a lot!* I thought... but "yeah, you can just use a DVR (and 'repurpose' the monitor muhaha)" is what I s...

This week marks 1 year of radical participation in Mozilla India towards MLS contributions. We've started and sustained activities to make India more and more visible on the Mozilla Location Service's map & now it's one of the brightest region for MLS, globally (especially Kerala - you guys deserve cookies... and nutella... and more battery packs).

Hey Mozilla India, Last one year has been hectic. We all know, it has been. But it was worth it. We've been busy doing things . We've been busy scaling up. May it be the first true 10x participation , may it be the first community launch of Firefox OS, may it be the first Firefox OS bus to reach out to the length & breadth of this big country, may it be the only place where the MozCamp was hosted in 2014, or may it be becoming the largest regional Mozilla community globally (or any FOSS community, for that matter). We've been executing at a scale that magnificently surpasses all the things we've done in previous years. And we did good! BUT, we've somehow forgotten to take care of the community itself . The community grew that large for what all we did in previous years, what we planned for it previously. But in last year, we've given much less attention to the growth and health of the community. The garden of Roses was so beautifully flourished, ...

I'm getting my feet wet with GlusterFS community . If you haven't heard of it yet, it's a distributed cloud file system by Red Hat. It's an open-source project with many goodness within, which empower Red Hat Storage (RHS) server. I was asked to look into the Gluster.org project site & make suggestions on how can we make it better. Better is a subjective term; it depends on the end goal and how far the plan can achieve it. I've set myself a goal & the goal is to radically increase participation in Gluster project. There are several parts to act on this, and all those will be communicated with in apt channels. This post, however, focuses on renovating the website as the public face & funnel to drive participation & contributions.

Continuing Reps' track discussion from the Mozilla Portland Workweek , one key topic that we schemed through & pinned to come back later, was to: Use The Mozilla Reps Program for Regional Leadership Development . Mitchell & Mark is highly interested and enthusiastic about autonomous & self-correcting local/regional leadership setups. A structure* that is highly distributed, interconnected, inclusive, autonomous, propagating and meritocratic in form. * This is my understanding, listening to various discussions & keynotes. In case this is misinterpreted - please do correct me. UPDATE: while I was at it, working on this blog for last 3 days (2G Internet, go figure :P), Rosana has already shared her thoughts on Reps' blog (crazy-weird, even the titles sound the same :D). You may choose to read that first to get the sense of where is it going. Following is my take on how can it be planned and implemented. Why ReMo? Obvious first question comes, why Reps ...