The Journey never ends

Four years have passed and my college life has almost come to an end. Well, as we all know time flies and waits for none. I was never a computer enthusiast and did not have any particular reason for taking up Computer Science for my bachelor’s degree. But now I am more passionate and do not regret my decision at all and the FOSS club at my university has played a major role in that.

It is FOSS@Amrita that made me explore, learn and love the work that I do. When I joined the club, I did not have many expectations and all I wanted was to equip myself with something. That turned out to be one of the best decisions that I have made. In the first year, all of us were assigned a mentor who was a senior student and we started off by learning some programming languages and doing small projects. The club does not follow a spoon-feeding culture and thereby gives us the freedom to make mistakes and learn the hard way. There are mentors and guides who are always ready to hear our problems and help us through the difficult times. Many people, including my family, have asked me how I could manage both academics and the club activities. To be honest, I have never found a problem in handling both of them together and in fact, one thing that I have understood is that when you really want to do something, somehow we will find a way.

Django Girls workshop – Thiruvananthapuram

This was my first experience as a coach! I had started learning Django towards the end of my second year in college and now it has been almost a year. As everyone says it is the perfectionist’s framework. It was never an easy task to learn Django though now when I look back it seems to be a simple framework. I had a tough time and somehow I happened to like the framework and went on to do some simple projects with it.

I had been following Django Girls organization since the time I had started learning Django. Their workshops used to be conducted all over the world. It was during my winter break I happened to notice the Django girls workshop at Thiruvananthapuram which is only around 2 hours far from my college. By then I had learned Django so I decided to apply as a coach. I also informed my friends who later applied for the same.

FOSS@Amrita

FOSS (Free or Open Source Software) programs are those that have licenses which will allow users to freely run the program for any purpose, modify the program and also distribute the original versions or the modified versions of them.

Amrita University has been ranked No.1 Private University in India. FOSS@Amrita is a student community at Amrita University and one of the most active student communities on the campus. We encourage, support and mentor students to improve their technical and social skills through contributing to open source. We are a community of students that support and guide each other towards making open source contributions, towards the usage of free software and also to shape them to be confident individuals.