I was there at GNOME.Asia Summit 2019

I was there at Gnome Asia Summit 2019 in Gresik, Indonesia as a speaker. Since I am very new to open source community this was a great experience. I conducted the New comers workshop with my pal Gaurav Agarwal from India. We had our parallel class on day 0 (which is actually day 1) on the premises of University of Muhammadhiya. The expenses of me to attend the event was sponsored by Gnome Foundation. I'm so thankful for this great opportunity.

Let me run through my experience in Gresik and in the conference. I and Guarav landed on 10th of October 2019 in Surabaya. Mr. Firdhous from local community came to pick us up and we had the hotel already booked in Gresik. They dropped us in Hotel Santika Gresik which was fabulous. On the next day I went to the conference and met with people from local community and open source community. I had my talk after lunch and It went very well. We used our personal experience and getting started with Gnome guide to steer the participants towards open source development.
On the first day we were taken to this beautiful hangout spot in a hilly area. I forgot the name of the place ;). All the speakers and organizers were there. we introduced our self and had a great dinner. People in Gresik were so nice.

On the second day it was the official start day of the conference. It was initiated by a beautiful traditional Indonesian dance. Followed by the keynote speeches. There were parallel classes after the end of the inauguration session. I had a hard time choosing which one to attend because all the talks were delivered by some of the best I've seen in open source community so far. I attended the Adhitiya's talk on Power management. That was an excellent and informative one. I think that was my favorite out of all the talks we had.
It was a tiring day but surprisingly the organizers have made dinner plans for us. we were taken to a traditional Indonesian hotel and all the speakers along with the local community volunteers had the dinner together. We had lot of time to talk and joke about each other. It was some of the best time I've had in that week.

Last day was almost the same as second day. We had parallel classes going on. I spend some time going through the stalls they had. Collected some awesome swags (Laptop stickers, camera covers etc). At last we had the closing ceremony. There were some awards given to the participants on answering questions related to talks on previous days and on that day. Finally we had the photo shoot.
It was hard for me to bid farewell. although i was there for just three days, I had so much connections. I loved the vibe. I got the urge to work with open source community more and more.