So it’s been roughly a week since FOSSASIA 2023 occurred and I finally took the time to write out my thoughts about it.

Getting to know about FOSSASIA

Not going to lie but before Feburary 2023, I’ve never heard of FOSSASIA in my life. I only heard about it when Sam was talking about how HackClub was invited to run a community booth during the event on Slack! When I took a look at it, it looked like an opportunity of a life time as there were so many different companies participating in the event and it was the first time in awhile where they were running an in-person conference. Immediately, I jumped on the ship of wanting to help out as it would be a great opportunity to learn more about open source projects and because it was just nice that school only starts the week after FOSSASIA.

The Setup

On Wednesday 12th April, I made my way all the way to Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI) which took me more than an hour because living in the west is absolutely great when you have to travel to the east. To my surprise, Sam has brought way too much stickers, like literally a whole container of stickers. I was beyond disbelief. We had to give out tons of stickers somehow. We settled on getting a little box from Popular to store all that amount of stickers.

It was a bit upsetting that we didn’t have a HackClub flag to display since shipping does take time and that meant that we won’t have a cool flag. All we had was some paper that said HackClub and made it look really unprofessional compared to other booths I also took a really long time to play around with the monitor, hoping that it would work with my MacBook but it just flickers and goes back to no signal non-stop. It would be a real shame if we didn’t get it to work and Sam brought it out for nothing.

Day 1

Of course, I came a bit late and this would be a common trend for the next few days since I’m not waking up at 6am just to get all the way to the east and seeing absolutely nobody. This time, I brought my little fedora PLD that has been chucked to the corner of my room which has been used as my mini server and my HDMI cable and I was thrilled when the monitor worked without a problem. Now we can finally display our scrapbook tv thingy which looks something like this. Day 1 was incredible. There were loads of foot traffic that day which led to many people inquiring about what HackClub is all about and has convinced some parents to setup a HackClub in their child school which is incredible!

Day 2

My terrible decisions to play osu! and write some code the night before has caused me to be late yet again but it’s alright, I wasn’t the latest out of everyone. In fact, I was the earliest. So you may be asking, well what code have I been working on? An absolute destruction of HackClub place¹ which has pissed off half of the community as all the time they spent on drawing pixels on the screen. Having the experience of creating the bots to r/placemonero, I hopped back to making a 10 minute prototype which worked extremely well since there were no rate limits on the server. Just because I could, I drew the osu logo on the entire canvas.

Well okay place aside, I did some not so sneak osu! at the booth since there were less people than expected, even after noon where I thought more people may come since it was a Friday.

Other than that, most of the time we were hanging out with other students at the BuildingBlocs booth which I joined in their community shortly after.

Social event (After 6pm)

I was shocked by the amount of people that were there and we spent most of our time eating at the beach room which also had a laptop with an open sourced karaoke application https://mixxx.org/ with questionable definitely not pirated music! Admittedly, my singing is horrible, but its alright when you’re having fun after a long tiring day.

We also took a picture during the event and… spot the missing Arash! Wow! finally, day 2 was over and it was 12am when I got to bed.

Day 3

Similarly to Day 2, there weren’t much people coming around the booths anymore so most of us abandoned the booth to go socialize with more people. During that day, Sam also gave a lightning talk about HackClub and how open source has been revolutionary to HackClub as a whole. Here’s the link to the video I filmed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afwQkr5UHpE.

Welp just like yesterday, we went and take a 360 picture without our favourite hackclubber Arash which I thought he was coming today. A 3D model should be rendered soon hopefully.

Well well, that pretty much concludes my time at FOSSASIA 2023, before I packed up, I snapped a few pictures of the “Orpheus” people have drawn on our fantastic paper. Oh. we also forced our BuildingBlocs friend to become DinoBox.

Conclusion

Overall I found this a really unique experience where I was able to find lot’s of professionals in the field while being able to interact with a few mates in our less serious community booth that I wouldn’t have a chance to if I was in an actual company. I got loads of swag too which is always appreciated when you are a developer since your closet is all free clothes you have gotten over the years! I am looking forward joining in on FOSSASIA 2024 and help out with the folks over at BuildingBlocs since their goals aligns with what I have in mind

Footnotes

1. HackClub Place is inspired by the r/place event taken place in 2017 and in 2022 ↩