Apache MeetUp held in Hill Country

The students of University of Peradeniya did a great job organizing an amazing Apache meet up at Kandy, Sri Lanka. This was the second major event in Sri Lanka next to the Apache Bar Camp Colombo that was held this year.

Here the first talk was on "FOSS in Kandy" by Dr. Nimal Rathnayaka, followed by Dr. Srinath Perera explaining "The Apache Way" of managing projects, how the communities work together and how they resolve conflicts using the voting system with the -1 veto. 

After the introduction of open source and Apache, Nandika Jayawardrdana gave an inspiring speech on "Open source and your career" giving out some valuable informations to the audience how one can use open source to become much better at his career. Here he explained how open source can improve your communication skills, writing skills - where you have to convince and argue on your ideas via the mailing list, and how your participation on open source makes you famous - which indeed will be eye catching even at the selection phase for a grad school, and most importantly he also expressed how we get a self satisfaction when so many people are using the product that you have build. This also falls according to the famous saying "A project without users (means, it) does not exist".  

Following this, Sagara Gunathunga gave a good briefing on how you can "Find your way to Apache Contribution", Here he not only stressed on coding but also mentions some other great ways of contributing, like writing technical blogs on the project, helping with documentation and testing the project. He continued explaining how these are extremely valuable to do when you are a newbie and gain recognition from your project community. 

After lunch, we had two practical sessions, the first one is on how to configure and use Apache Web Server in an efficient manner - by Anuradha Ratnaweera, and the second was on "Apache build projects" - by Prabath Abeysekara and myself, where we demonstrated Apache Subversion, Maven and Ant. 

Finally the session was concluded with Pradeeban's lighting talk on how to build a community for your project.