Tag Archives: open source software

Revision 100

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I’m about to reach another milestone in my current work. A beta release will be out in a not so far future, after months & months of iteration. It won’t be a big deal for most people, but for me, it has been a journey & experience to whip out something from scratch. Well, almost… Hehe.

I’ve always been a Drupal developer since Drupal 4, but having been working on so many different PHP development frameworks over the years, I’ve learned that Drupal has always been the most suitable partner for me in web development. WordPress is cool, but not for many things. CakePHP is delicious, but it’s going to take awhile for me to properly digest the M-V-C. And Textpattern is simply beautiful.

I’ve always been the procedural type of developer (think C++), but hey, learning ain’t easy but it’s always fun!

As a self taught web artist & developer, I’ve (maybe, maybe not) mastered the true arts of CSS ever since the first time I’ve glished (is there such a word?) my eyes on the meyerweb in 2001 & succumbed into the power of Zeld. One thing weird though, lately I’ve been guiding my coworkers on the force and I never thought that what I’ve learned while skipping classes & hanging out at the computer lab in college would be useful & actually teaching it to other people.

In fact, the job I have right now was totally based on skill, because if I compare myself with my colleagues, I’m a lot less academically than they are. And honestly, they are great & good people and has been & will always be a pleasure working with them, although I’m the oldest (in age) in the development team. Plus, I’ve been having working on weird & unbelieveable jobs after I graduated high school, and this has been the best for me, so far.

Right now, I’m on my way to (hopefully) absorb & understand the awesomeness of Drupal, telling myself to make the best out of what I have & hoping to share with the world with what I’ve learned.

I’m also about to tread on another path: agriculture. Going to grow me some vegetables & fruits!

Aizat & the FOSS.my dudes has infected me with the “awesomeness” bug. Spray spray! New buzzword please! Haha!

Lady luck, don’t leave me yet :)

FOSSified at FOSS.my 2008

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Another great event by the great people of Malaysia. Collaborative event management will be the new trend. BarCamp Malaysia & FOSS.my will be the two events that I will follow and criticise closely as these two events are eye openers for Malaysians who has been living under the coconut shell for a very long time.

FOSS.my was a great success as it has brought together 250 people (or more) from all around Malaysia, Singapore, India, Japan, Australia & the United States. I’m pretty sure I’ve missed a few more countries, but my point is that people were sharing knowledge & experiences like crazy in the event.

The open source culture, which is not relatively new in Malaysia, will be the upcoming trend in the next few years. As pointed out several times by the speakers from FOSS.my, the government played a major role in putting open source software up & down people’s throat as the new “in” thing. This year FOSS.my event, from my observation, has injected the right kind of spirit & gave hope to the open source aficionados that it’s not a weird thing to be advocating some good for once in their lifetime. And being weird is good, never bad. It makes you a little bit more interesting, in a weird way.

Although I was expecting a lot more technical talks, but putting forward conceptual talks about the open source movement was the right thing to do for the first time. I’m not sure it was done on purpose by the organisers, my guess for next year is that you will be expecting more than 250 people attending the event. It’s a longshot, but looking at the faces of the attendees & listening to them being so excited, it’s a foreseeable future. I hope next year, the FOSS.my committee would mix the talks more evenly, for example, Track 1 talking on concepts & Track 2 touching on technical aspects of open source movement & software. Maybe with this mixture, you will catch a good, balanced crowd & the attendees will be able to not miss the talks they like to attend. I’m saying this because I missed Toru Maesaka’s talk on memcached while learning the new hotness in source control called (gi)git with Kamal. But it’s all good.

As I hope the spirit of open source will never die, I also hope the direction & most importantly the intention of these 2 events will never fade away. Talking from experience, I’ve helped organised sevaral collaborative events in the past in the entertainment & action sports industry, I must say it was sad to see that some has creep their way to the dark side & failed to return to innocence.

Good job to the FOSS.my team. I salute you. And people, take a look at what happened.

Update: One more thing though, the food was a huge disappointment. Some were expecting some nasi briyani buffet or nasi lemak kinda thing. Subways? Ungh. It’s geek food, but not Malaysian food. Burp.