SymPy Workshop at FOSSASIA 2016, Singapore 🎙️
SymPy · Scientific Computing · FOSSASIAHi there! Last week I went to Singapore for FOSSASIA Open Tech Summit 2016. I conducted a Worskhop on SymPy and assisted the PyDy Workshop in Python track hosted by Kushal Das. This blog post accounts to my experience as a speaker, as a attendee at FOSSASIA and as a traveler to Singapore.
About FOSSASIA
FOSSASIA is the premier Free and Open Source technology event in Asia for developers, start-ups, and contributors. Projects at FOSSASIA range from open hardware, to design, graphics and software. FOSSASIA was established in 2009. Previous events took place in Cambodia and Vietnam.
As the name suggests its one of the largest tech conferences in Asia and my expectations were pretty high from this conference and moreover It was my first international conference. I witnessed lots of amazing people in the conference and interacted with a few as well. This is how it started:
The SymPy/PyDy Workshop
Community is more important than Code @ Singapore Science Center Level 3, Pauling Lab
The SymPy and PyDy workshop was scheduled on 20th March at 1:00 - 2:00 PM (PyDy) and 2:00 - 4:00 PM (SymPy). Jason suggested to conduct the SymPy workshop first since PyDy uses SymPy and it would be easier for people to learn SymPy first and then PyDy, but since the schedule was already published, It was not possible to reschedule the workshops, so we had to continue with PyDy first. Sahil started the PyDy workshop at 1:00 PM, though we had to spend a lot of time installing Anaconda to everyone’s systems by creating a local server and distributing flash drives as most of the people didn’t had Anaconda or Canopy installed. This has been the problem for almost all the workshops I have conducted in the past. It seems I need to invent an efficient way to do this faster in future as we spent 30-40 odd minutes in installation.
Fortunately Sahil finished his presentation at around 2:15 PM. Then I took over for SymPy workshop, I started with the basic introduction to SymPy, the slides can be found here. Then I jumped to IPython notebook exercises to demonstrate more of SymPy. People were amazed by the capabilities of this amazing piece of software. The most beautiful feature they liked was printing and integration. The workshop went pretty well except for the glitches in the HDMI port of my laptop (probably, its the right time to get a new laptop). Here are some SymPy stickers for you, if you missed there.
Singapore was Fun ;)
Visiting Singapore has been a great experience, the culture is a mix of Malaysian, Indian and native Singaporean. The City is well connected with MRT/SMRT (Metro and Buses). It’s quite easy get anywhere around the city. People here are very helpful and nice. I didn’t faced any problems throughout my stay there. I spent most of my time near Science Center, China Town and Little India. There were lot of people from India and particularly from Delhi and three from my University. It was awesome time spent with geeks all around. Tagging some of them Mayank, Ishaan, Umair, Jigyasa, Yask, Garvit, Manan, sorry If I missed someone. Here is a pic of the last day of the conference.
Thank you!
Thank you FOSSASIA Organizing Team, Hong Phuc Dang for inviting me to be part of this awesome FOSS community. I would not have been able to attend the conference without the generous financial support from SymPy, Thank you Ondrej Certik, Aaron Meurer & SymPy contributors.
Good Bye!
Good bye! everyone, see you on my next blog post, meanwhile you can have a look at a Picture of me doing back flip at Sentosa ;)
