Go verify (y)ours by: https://spf.access.nu/

Once that was fixed, we internally setup two small pieces of infrastructure we now depend on daily. We self-host Miniflux for our internal RSS reading (only few use, I'm one heavy user), replacing whatever scattered bookmarks we were using before, and alongside it, Umami for analytics, watching traffic on Forklore, Licence to Learn, and the rest of the FOSS United network without handing that data to a third party. Both are the kind of quiet, unglamorous tools that make the rest of the work possible.

Speaking of quiet, unglamorous work: this month's biggest project was accessibility, and it deserves more than a passing mention.

We started a focused audit of the IndiaFOSS 2026 pages and their neighbours, as a slice of the larger accessibility effort tracked in #786. The stats page, the talks archive, booths, pre-events, and the devrooms are done for this round. The schedule page, the CFP form, proposal details, and ticketing are still on the list. I have been going through pages with a screen reader (Orca, on Linux) to check whether things actually make sense when spoken aloud rather than just looking right on screen, and Rahul has been working through tabbing order and keyboard navigation across the same pages. Reading a page with your eyes closed teaches you things that reading a design mockup never will.

We also got real help from outside the core team. Gauri found that the Schedule page has low-contrast UI that fails WCAG AA (#1707), and Amith Biju traced a progress-report issue back to a frappe-ui component that needs an upstream version bump to fix many accessibility issue over dashboard properly (#1696). Both are exactly the kind of finding that is easy to miss from the inside and obvious once someone points it out. If you use assistive technology and hit something that does not work right on any FOSS United page, please open an issue. One report per page is enough to help us prioritize.

On the product side, one addition We've afresh is My Tickets page. If you have ever bought a ticket to a FOSS United event and then lost the confirmation email, or wanted to check whether you are registered for something six months from now, this page is for you. Log in, and it shows every ticket tied to your account, split into upcoming and concluded, each with its QR code ready to go, and a direct download and calendar button. Small thing, long overdue.

Jobs, clubs, and the events timeline all picked up a list view this month, next to the existing grid, so you can scan them the way that suits you, credit to Siddharth Bansal (@sidd190) for that work. He also spent time hardening our ticket and check-in endpoints after a security audit, his first real dive into the fossunited codebase after joining last month.

The CFP form also grew some organiser-facing flexibility: event organisers can now override session types, categories, and speaker-field requirements to fit their own event, rather than being stuck with one global shape for every CFP on the platform. And there is a small but appreciated addition for attendees: events can now say plainly whether lunch, coffee, or nothing is provided, so nobody has to wonder or ask around.

Two more things worth a line each. The devroom pages got a design tweak with a themed pattern now running through the listing and each page, keeping them visually compact and consistent. And workshops, booths, the FOSS Awards page, and pre-events all went live for IndiaFOSS 2026, each managed the same way, directly through Frappe's page tooling rather than a code deploy. It is a good reminder that not everything that ships this month is a pull request.

Last thing: we started a weekly reading session as a team, going through resources on codebase practices and better software habits. We will start sharing what we read here, so keep an eye out next month.

Here's what we read for this month:

• https://martinfowler.com/articles/practical-test-pyramid.html (ngl its huge load)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIPbE7BssOs
• https://mtlynch.io/code-review-love/
• https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/ & https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-2/
• https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck
• https://www.simplermachines.com/lets-not-call-it-tech-debt-its-just-mess/
• https://blainsmith.com/essays/humanities-in-the-machine/

Now, the technical list for those who like the details.

Accessibility Audit (#786)

IndiaFOSS 2026 and neighbouring pages audited this round: stats, archive (list/speakers/talk), booths, pre-events, devrooms. Fixes for tabbing order, sponsor-tier announcements, and misc a11y issues on the archive and dashboard. Pending: schedule, CFP form, proposal details, ticketing.

My Tickets Page

New /my-tickets page shows every ticket bought by the session user, grouped into upcoming/concluded, with cached QR codes, calendar, and download buttons.

Visit -> https://fossunited.org/dashboard/my-tickets

List/Grid Views (#1650, #1663, #1664)

List view toggle added to jobs, clubs, and the events timeline. Credits: Siddharth Bansal.

Visit: https://fossunited.org/jobs, https://fossunited.org/events/timeline, https://fossunited.org/clubs

Security Hardening (#1704)

Ticket and check-in endpoints hardened following an internal audit. Credits: Siddharth Bansal.

Order Revalidation (#1698)

Orders are revalidated before fulfillment; refunds lock before the Razorpay call; automatic refunds removed per the no-refund policy. First contribution from Anas Khan.

CFP Form Customization (#1727, #1726)

Organisers can override session types, categories, contact-info visibility, and speaker-photo requirement per event. The CFP form now shows an event's own description as its guideline text, falling back to the global one only when unset.

Ticketing & T-shirts (#1712, #1716, #1695)

Free ticket coupons can include a t-shirt; volunteer forms can ask for size; events can declare a catering option (none / lunch / coffee).

Infrastructure: Email Delivery

Fixed missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records on fossunited.org. Full story linked above.

Self-Hosted Tools

Miniflux for internal RSS reading; Umami for analytics across Forklore, Licence to Learn, and the FOSS United network.

Fixes

Ambiguous link text across docs and web pages fixed (#1697, first contribution from saksham mishra); underlined href links inside paragraphs; grant currency sum fix on number cards; Bruno API test runner added to pre-commit hooks.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

As always, drop suggestions and issues at GitHub or Codeberg.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Matthew

The Rethink DNS + Firewall project got off to a front-foot start after Matthew Prince, CEO at Cloudflare, publicly offered to hire (?) us, 3 jobless ambitious friends to work on it, merely based on the ideas we laid out on Hacker News (in April 2019, during Ramadan, no less), and one that we didn’t even know would materialize, if at all. In a short while, even after being rejected by Y Combinator for the 2020 winter batch (we’re in good company), we found several (Indian) VCs (rather, analysts cosplaying as general partners) beating down our door to meet with us… Needless to say, this was an avoidable exercise in frustration. Still, I was impressionable back then, had too many magical thoughts about being the next Rajoshi Ghosh, the next Sid Sijbrandij, the next Avery Pennarun, & went to all humiliating meetings expecting something different from each. Once bitten, twice shy? Not me. In the end, these interactions disenchanted me pretty early on, to my benefit: Developing a free cybersecurity software out of social responsibility is not for the uninitiated to grok. On the other hand, it is convenient to loathe those who have more of what you desire for yourself. Anyways, 8 months later, Mozilla was kind enough to choose us (the only India-based project) out of the 1200+ projects that applied, for their 4 month (July to Oct 2020) “Fix the Internet” Incubator. It was modeled after Y Combinator, of which our cohort of 22 projects & companies was expected to be the first of many (it remained the first of only). An eventful accelerating experience, as we shipped more features in those 4 months than we have done in any other time period since. Being accountable to someone you respect out of peer pressure and the fear of failure (in this case, our mentors at Mozilla) was a hell of a motivator (Avicenna, the father of modern medicine, was right: classrooms / cohorts breed healthy competition). If I am allowed to be vulnerable, I’ll say that folks at Mozilla didn’t appear all too impressed with us, or our project, despite our herculean effort to build the anti-Onavo (Facebook’s spyware VPN), to succeed where Moxie Marlinspike’s OpenWhisperSystems didn't. So be it…

All it takes is a little push

In January 2020, Android app MVP built & shipped in 14 days, Rethink DNS (a name chosen by our community) started out as Brave DNS before we were hit with a threatening lawyerism for trademark infringement. At the time, it was flattering that we were important enough for any high-flying ponzi crypto businesses based in Silicon Valley to take us seriously, because clearly, the users weren’t: There was nary a relevant forum, Twitter thread, Discord, subreddit, or Telegram group we didn’t spam, but the downloads count just about crawled past 50 by 28 Aug 2020. It caught the attention of those lawyers, though.

On 29 Aug 2020, a popular Android blog featured the app, and we sprinted past 5000 users in one day. From there on, we kept acquiring 10 users a week, then 20, then 30, then 100, which has now settled at 1000 (and stagnant). To think that one blogger can have such an outsized impact is a lesson in timing, luck, and well, influencer marketing. We don’t get popular press nor influencers to shill about us, because we refuse to pay for the privilege. It is either word-of-mouth or bust. Especially if that word comes from project leads at the Guardian Project (Nathan Freitas), CalyxOS (Chirayu Desai), Jigsaw at Google (Vinicius Fortuna, Scott Carpenter), LineageOS (Oliver Scott), Ente (Vishnu Mohandas), GrapheneOS (Daniel Micay), and PrivacyInternational… that’s all the social validation we’ll ever need.

We are also lucky enough to be constantly supported by a selfless community of translators, moderators, group members, code contributors, willing testers, and generous sponsors that organically grew around our many humble projects. FOSS has its perks. I'm not the one to give “prescriptions”, but since this occasion calls for it, the primary reason why all our projects (even the embarrassing ones) are open source is that “you can't fight gravity” (impressed into me at AWS)… of software wanting to be free. This stance isn't at odds with making money with FOSS (especially B2B), but rather consistent with knowing the constraints & rules of the levers that can be pulled.

Retention is all you need

One of the few reasons we don’t want more users is, we’ve plenty of work left to do for a lifetime. Aside from going to town with i18n (translations), the other priceless tactical decision we made (owning to my 8 year kool-aid training at the AWS mothership on “customer obsession”) was to make it straight forward for our non-paying users to direct their frustration & anger at us: We put links right in our app to our subreddit, GitHub issues, Telegram group, Mastodon, and X (formerly Twitter), which till date, brings in a constant stream of hate love, bug reports, and feature requests to keep us busy until we physically die (which could be any instant, if the Universe isn’t kind). With no mentors left to impress but only actual users (and a few well-meaning professors and communities), we had found our pathway to building the most feature-rich bug-ridden firewall that could possibly be built. Thankfully, GLM, DeepSeek, and MiMo don’t tire like we do from mashing keyboards all day long. We do have a credible shot at vibecoding it all, whether we do it or not (due to code quality concerns), is a different matter. And much to my chagrin, there’s no shortage of vibecoded apps that mimic our project’s features, built in mere weeks, with way fewer bugs, by teenagers who don’t even know what "Cloud" is. Am I crazy? Am I being left behind? Possibly, none or both. Strange times.

In the course of our new found popularity, our DNS resolvers (server-side) were being hammered by, I am presuming, bot networks based out of Turkmenistan, Russia, China, and Iran. The peak (that is, the traffic that got past bot detection) we’ve handled thus far records at 40,000 requests per second, pushing 400TB per month in bandwidth. Optimising every part of the server-side stack short of ripping out the runtime (Node, Workerd, Bun, & Deno) seemed like a thankless, endless engineering challenge just to control the burn rate. I learnt well at AWS to craft-fully avoid the scale of it ruining our sleep, so we did sleep well through it all (except for the times when my twins wouldn’t let me). Due to the unkind invoices, not only did my wife’s savings vanish into ether, but all my credit cards maxxed out in what seemed like a blink. I was now relegated to drinking Sunrise instead of Davidoff. Ours was obviously a textbook case of magical thinking, that rich people EAs will appear from nowhere and start funding our marvelously engineered, censorship-resistant, public-benefit resolver. Alas, on the WWW, popularity is not always a good thing, as Wikipedia reminds us.

Aisi vaani boliye, man ka aapa khoye. Auran ko sheetal kare, aapahu sheetal hoye.

In humans, a near-death experience can bring ample philosophical clarity and rewire psychology. For an unsustainable Free & Open Source project in existential crises, there's but repeated burnout, partly from the endless grind of bugs and feature requests, partly from lack of (monetary) incentives beyond motivation & curiosity, which are never in short supply when you're starting out with an intense desire to want this thing to exist and thrive. From experience, there's no clarity, only bitterness. It isn’t uncommon then for disgruntled FOSS maintainers abandon their absurd Sysphiyan journey or go on rants about “rivals” (like we did; it's a rite of passage). For our project, Rethink DNS + Firewall, we drew plans (in other words, “magical thoughts”) to monetise and live off of it. A million users in 2026, but are we there yet? No. Either it isn’t easy, or we are incompetent. I’d like to think the former, because the thought of the latter is uneasy. We do have plenty of reasons to doubt ourselves regardless, because outside of Mozilla, no other like-minded organization incubated us, supported us, or entertained our applications. In one case, an organization outright refused to meet us, despite the fact that we flew over hills and oceans to do so. I digress.

Not all nails and thorns though. Other doors opened. Between FOSS United, Cloudflare, (now defunct) OSOM Inc, and Zerodha’s FLOSS/fund, we found much-needed respite. Without that, we were toast, both personally & professionally. The Cloudflare angle is interesting because we were one of the early ones to abuse the potential of their Workers Platform for anti-censorship purposes. Since then, many other popular tools and projects have cropped up; and to boost my ego, I like to take credit for kickstarting it all. Cloudflare’s Eng Leads, VPs, SVPs continued to give us time as if ours was a project of consequence & importance. Maybe it is. As before, my ego needs no second invitation.

In particular, FOSS United and FLOSS/fund’s contributions have afforded us, for the first time in years, to be more ambitious & fearless; and present our work to the world, at conferences like FOSDEM. We even treated ourselves to one MacBook Pro M4 to build out a Rethink-like DNS + Firewall for iOS (one of the top asks on the subreddit). Perhaps even pwnd billionaires will find utility in network security tools like Rethink. Our rejuvenation reiterates the importance of India-based organisations and how they readily relate and promptly support India-based developers, while the rest simply wouldn’t, for brownies that escape me. If I am allowed to be cynical, I know what colour I am wearing, the race I am running.

I don’t only want to take, take, take, though. I’d like to think we’ve contributed back to FOSS United by showcasing our modest projects at India FOSS since 2023 (in Sep 2022, I was vacationing in London & Bournemouth, just so you know what I'm sacrificing to attend it). We participate despite the unavoidable shade from disinterested onlookers who make us second-guess our life choices. Not blaming them, as maybe, just maybe, our projects are way too sus… or the three 2 of us are going through mid-life crises… but we still show up, & put our best foot forward. Before I go, I’ll also milk the point, even if no one will concede, of bringing Vishnu at Ente into the FOSS United fold (Vishnu wouldn't even enter the NIMHANS premises when I invited him to India FOSS 2023). What a positive addition to this community Ente has been (if I may say so myself)! As for me, the infectious influence emanating from the successes of ERPNext (Frappé) & Rushabh has brought us all here to this moment. Now, with OpenAI Rushabh as our north star, we do want to give back way more solely out of guilt as a reflection of our gratitude. This blog post is one. Aren’t you inspired?

We are excited to announce a grant of ₹3,00,000 to Subtitle Studio, a modern, cross-platform subtitle editing application.

How it began

Msone is a voluntary fan-subtitling group dedicated to providing free Malayalam subtitles for international movies. Over time, the volunteers in the community frequently expressed the hardships they faced with existing subtitle workflows. Most of the available tools were restricted to desktop environments, and in many cases, exclusively limited to the Windows operating system. Most of the volunteer translators also used mobile apps for subtitle creation. So building a feature rich subtitle editor for mobile became a necessity.

The community needed a solution that wouldn't tie them to a specific device or OS. Understanding this problem, and after quite some feedback from the community, Mujeeb Rahman K, Anzil, and Samir set out to build a tool that would solve these issues.

About Subtitle Studio

Subtitle Studio is a fully free, cross-platform solution that works across all major mobile and PC operating systems. It supports both the creation of new subtitles and the translation of existing ones.

The Android version is available on the Google Play Store, the macOS and iOS versions are available on the Apple App Store, and the Windows and Linux versions can be downloaded directly.

The application brings powerful desktop-grade features to a cross-platform environment, including:

1. Audio Waveform Visualization: A highly requested feature rarely found in mobile-based subtitle editors.
2. Dual Subtitle Support
3. Custom Dictionaries: Utilizing open data from Olam as the default.
4. Video Loading and Subtitle Extraction
5. Marking, Commenting, and Project Saving
6. AI-Assisted Explanations

The Road Ahead

The development team is actively working on expanding the app's capabilities, with features like multi-device content syncing currently in the pipeline. We are proud to support Mujeeb, Anzil, Samir, and the broader Msone community with this grant as they continue to build accessible, cross-platform tools that empower voluntary contributors and translators.

If you'd like to get involved, check out Subtitle Studio's GitHub repository to contribute code, report issues, or suggest features. You can also try the tool yourself at studio.malayalamsubtitles.org.

If you’re a maintainer looking for support, check out the Grants Program. If you’re an organisation/individual that wants to contribute back, reach out.

When I started, I thought this job was about building an events platform (just like you). Register, buy a ticket, submit a talk, review + manage proposals, attend the event and call it a day. And a lot of it is exactly that. But over twelve months the picture kept widening. FOSS United is not only about events. There are grants, fellowships, FOSS clubs in colleges, a maintainers program, an education program, self-hosting and promoting services, a jobs board, a directory of Indian maintainers and much more. Events are the part you can see easily; the programs are the part that quietly does the long work. That realisation is the theme of this month, so I will come back to it at the end.

Looking back across the twelve months, the work tells its own story. It began with the parts that rarely get noticed: August and September laid down the jobs board, RSS, permissions, ticketing, schedules and the CFP flow, the groundwork where correctness is not optional. October brought the review system and mailing, November the events page redesign, the grants directory and RSVP self check-in with host approval, and December the quieter work: RSVP insights, CFP refinements, and a real accessibility pass.

January was mostly groundwork, and then February and March went almost entirely into FOSS Hack 2026: the hackathon page, dashboard dark mode, security hardening, the results page, and a rebuilt ticket purchase flow. From April to May the focus turned to the programs, the schedule redesign, the CFP reviewer workflow, Maintainers May, the IndiaFOSS 2026 kickoff. June lowered the barrier for new contributors, and July brings the rest of this post. A year on, the platform is less a ticketing tool and more the backbone of a foundation, and that shift is the thread running through all of it.

First, the big technical news, and it is not even on this platform.

Forklore moved house. forklore.in, our directory of Indian FOSS maintainers, was built on Nuxt.js by Harsh Tandiya and designed by Antara Paul & Jeswin. It is, at heart, a site that shows mostly unchanging pages. Running a full JavaScript framework for that is like keeping a car idling in the driveway to charge your phone (bad pun, IK). So we migrated it to Eleventy (11ty), a plain static site generator. Fewer moving parts, faster pages, and far less that can break at two in the morning. The boring choice, and the right one. As a small team, "simple enough that it does not need babysitting" is a feature we value a lot.

This was the first official work Siddharth Bansal aka Siddharth II was assigned to and handled completely on his own. He made the migration in-place replace very much possible with nobody noticing it peculiarly. The whole data now stays in human readable mardown file itself compared to previous JSON pain.

We launched Licence to Learn. licencetolearn.in is a new campaigns program. India's premier institutes are largely public-funded, yet a lot of what they produce and decide sits behind closed doors. Licence to Learn collects and publishes RTI (Right to Information) responses from these institutes, so that what belongs in the public domain actually reaches the public. The site is built with Zola, another simple static site generator (you may notice a pattern in our taste this month). If you want to know who built it and the thinking behind it, the credits page has the people and the story. Do go read a few of the responses; some of them are eye-opening.

Then there is the usual IndiaFOSS hustle, which never really stops. This month we shipped a IndiaFOSS Talks Archive, a single place that aggregates every IndiaFOSS talk with links back to the speaker and the proposal. The 2026 landing page also grew a live countdown and a lighter, themed look. And behind the scenes, the whole CFP review process was reworked for the IndiaFOSS 2026 co-chairs, reviewers can now mark must-have talks, leave private notes for each other, and the proposers' editing window is properly controlled by the deadline. Reviewing hundreds of proposals is hard, human work; the least the software can do is get out of the way.

Now, two things about people, one bittersweet and one hopeful.

Muneer is moving on, sort of. Muneer was our design intern, and if you have liked how any social media posters looked around lately, some of that is his hand. He is now moving into a fellowship to work on the debian.org website, tackling its long-standing design and usability issues. So he is leaving our team, but not the ecosystem. He is going to make a much older, much larger piece of the FOSS commons a little friendlier for everyone.

And we are re-imagining our own front door. This connects back to what I said earlier. For a long time our landing page has told visitors that FOSS United does events. True, but incomplete. It says almost nothing about the grants that fund maintainers, the fellowships, the clubs, the education work, Licence to Learn, Forklore. So the whole team is now iterating on a redesign of the landing page and the top-level pages, to connect these dots and show the full shape of what this foundation actually does. It is early, we are still sketching and arguing (in the good way), but I wanted to share that it is happening.

As a small step in that direction, the /stack page was rebuilt this month to be cleaner, link to the live hosted tools we run, and carry a short note from the team, slowly turning it into a proper credits page for the software and people we lean on.

That is the state of things at one year in: a wider understanding of what we are, a few sites made simpler, a new campaign in the world, a friend off to help Debian, and a redesign that tries to tell our whole story instead of just the easy part. Thank you for reading these reports for a year. Here is to the next one.

Now, the technical list for those who like the details.

CFP Review Process Overhaul (#1627)

Reviewers can now mark a proposal as "must-have" and leave private comments for other reviewers and organisers (added at the IndiaFOSS 2026 co-chairs' request). Reviews are hidden by default, proposers stop getting a notification on every review, and proposer editing is now controlled by the CFP deadline and status (fixes #1628). Proposal API access is limited to chapter members.

IndiaFOSS Talks Archive (#1635)

Visit: https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/archive

A new Event Media doctype and archive page aggregate every IndiaFOSS talk, cross-linking each to its speaker profile, proposal, and schedule slot. Built to expand to other events later.

IndiaFOSS 2026 Landing

Visit: https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2026

Themed background pattern, hero image, a live hours:minutes:seconds countdown, and timeline ordering by deadline.

Stack / Credits Page

Visit: https://fossunited.org/stack

/stack rebuilt into a single template with richer fields (description, live hosted URL, status) and an optional credits section, on the way to merging /stack and /credits.

HTTPS Link Normalization (#1634)

Speaker social links are normalized to include https:// so they don't resolve as relative paths. First contribution from Akshit Tyagi.

Dashboard Performance (#1631)

Duplicate session user-profile API requests are now deduplicated. First contribution from Paramveer singh.

Documentation

A large education / Licence to Learn curriculum docs push and FOSS Club guideline updates (#1641, #1639). Credits: Siddharth I

Chapters & Jobs

Past chapter members shown on the chapter page; jobs page has a link to the Aikyam board for social-sector roles.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

As always, feel free to drop suggestions and issues at GitHub.

We're thrilled to announce a grant of INR 6 lakhs to Aravinda VK, in support of his continued work on Sanka, Chitra, Binnacle, Dataframes (D) and other open source projects.

How it started

Aravinda's introduction to free and open source software goes back to 2006, through local Linux user groups and install fests. He was struck by a simple idea, that you could publish your code for anyone to use, learn from, or build on. Two decades later, that idea has turned into a small constellation of open source projects, most of which he still maintains largely on his own, alongside his work as a Partner at Kadalu Investments.

The projects

Sanka is a set of tools for working with Kannada text – encoding conversions, and font and script tooling for the language. Its ASCII-to-Unicode conversion tool is relied on by government offices and organisations, and it powers part of the tooling behind Zerodha's Alar Kannada dictionary. The Sanka app on its own now sees around 50,000 users a month, many of whom have made their own YouTube tutorials to help others use it.

Chitra ("drawing" in Kannada) is a 2D graphics library that lets you generate images and PDFs programmatically, using a simple, readable command syntax inspired by Drawbot and Processing. Built on Cairo and Pango, it's natively supported in the D programming language, with Lua bindings in progress to make it usable from virtually any language or the command line.

Binnacle is an imperative testing and infrastructure automation framework, currently used internally to test and provision GlusterFS clusters and their REST-based storage management APIs. Its syntax is meant to be simple enough that a new test writer or admin can get productive within minutes.

Dataframes (D) brings a Pandas-like dataframe library to the D programming language.

The Grant

The 6 lakh grant will go toward sustaining Aravinda's time across the open source projects. Work planned includes fixing bugs reported by Sanka's users, and rebuilding it as a JavaScript library so that developers can embed it properly inside mobile apps or web pages, instead of wrapping the entire web app the way many users currently do. On Chitra, the grant supports continued work on the Lua bindings and curve support, to make the library easier to adopt outside the D ecosystem. Binnacle and Dataframes (D) will see ongoing maintenance, enhancements, and documentation, with Dataframes (D) moving toward a wider release to D language user groups once it's ready.

Continuing the tradition this year, the foundation and the community got together to organise #MaintainersMay!

We started the campaign with a community call, where we invited our Maintainer Community to share feedback on the Maintainers Program, discuss challenges they face and support they require, and brainstormed a bunch of activities that we could plan during the month. A recording is available here -

Maintainer Meetups

The Maintainer Summit organised as an IndiaFOSS 2025 pre-event was a huge success. There were conversations around sustainability, burnout, marketing for FOSS projects, and a whole bunch of interesting topics. More importantly, this made us realise the value of such a forum that brings together these Maintainers in an unconference format. Taking inspiration from the summit, we decided to organise such meetups all over India during #MaintainersMay.

With the help of our volunteers, meetups were organised in Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru and Mumbai.

Detailed notes from discussions that happened at the meetups are posted here.

Huge thanks to Akshit, Onkar, Soham, Rajan (and the RedHat Pune team), Arun for helping out with the events.

Maintainer Meetups have gone well beyond May, and we will continue organising these through the year. We'll see some of you at the Maintainer Summit IndiaFOSS 2026 pre-event in September!

Notes from a Maintainer

We had always wanted to feature guest posts on our blog, and inviting Maintainers to tell their stories seemed like a great start! In May, we featured Prashanth Udupa, Ramya R. and Subhashish P. They are all veterans in the FOSS ecosystem, and their stories are worth a read.

Seeing how everyday citizens, armed with open tools and data, could actively shape disaster response, infrastructure, and urban planning changed everything for me. I realized that public service didn't have to look like a traditional bureaucratic career. FOSS isn't just a development methodology rather it is a vehicle for public equity at a massive scale.

- Ramya

If you are building something open source and you are not plugged into FOSS United, you are leaving a lot on the table.

Not because the community will do the work for you. It won't. But because the right conversation at the right time, with the right person, can unblock something you've been stuck on for months. A designer at a conference fixed my icons. A break-time chat about documentation changed how I handle support. An intern connection gave me features I couldn't build alone. A lawyer I'd never have found otherwise protected my project from patent risk.

None of these were planned. All of them happened because I showed up, gave talks, attended sessions, and talked to people. Scrite is what it is today partly because of the code I wrote, and partly because of the community I found. I'm grateful for both.

- Prashanth

Speech synthesis has always fascinated me as a technology. During 2014-2015, I reviewed the quality of eSpeak, an open-source speech synthesiser for Odia, as part of a Centre for Internet and Society project. While eSpeak remains one of the oldest and most widely used text-to-speech systems for Indian languages, its synthesised voice sounds unnatural and is hard to use for long periods. Though it's possible to build high-quality speech synthesis models with less data now, training speech synthesis models requires a lot of voice data. We also brought the Odia Wiktionary to life, a dictionary with meanings in many languages. Shitikantha Dash, a fellow Wikimedian, helped add over 100K headwords from the 1930–1941 lexicon Purnnachandra Ordia Bhashakosha. I started recording words to add pronunciations to Wiktionary and build a dataset for a future ASR project. Then, I started a project called Kathabhidhana based on a Python script written by Shrinivasan T. Later, open-source projects Lingua Libre, where I was a top contributor across all the languages supported at the time, and Mozilla Common Voice made this process easier. This project, with over 78,000 recordings, became the largest Odia voice dataset to be published with a Public Domain release. It was later archived in the Library of Congress's permanent digital records while serving over 21,000 pages on Wiktionary.

- Subhashish

You can read all of the blog posts here. This initiative has also went beyond #MaintainersMay, and we now bring you a guest blog post from a new maintainer every month!

All of this started as a fun experiment to find out if there were more than 30 maintainers in India. There are close to 100 people on forklore now. Clearly, India's FOSS ecosystem is growing faster than ever, and our support for the hundreds of people doing quality FOSS work in India has to be a show of force too. Over the last 6 months, we've spent a lot of time rethinking our approach to supporting the digital commons ecosystem. India's digital infrastructure rests on the shoulders of people like these. Behind almost every project that powers modern software infrastructure, there is a person or a small group of people who decided to build something and keep it alive. Foundations, Communities, Organisations and Companies all play important roles in the FOSS ecosystem, but the fundamental atomic unit of FOSS is the individuals who show up. This is why supporting these individuals is the foundation of our work.

The Maintainers Program is our initiative to support Indian FOSS project maintainers across the breadth of their entire journey, from getting discovered to becoming sustainable. A lot more Indians will be creating FOSS this decade, we want to help them sustain and navigate their journeys. If you're an organisation that wants to give back to the Indian FOSS ecosystem, or a Maintainer looking for support, please reach out.

We're thrilled to announce a grant of INR 8 lakhs to Webminal. It is a free, browser-based Linux terminal and learning platform that has been running since 2011 developed by Lakshmipathi G.

How it started

Around 2010, Lakshmipathi G was an ordinary developer in India, working on a Windows machine, trying to learn Linux. Documentation and tutorials have always existed. But an actual place to practice, a real shell where you typed a command and something real happened on the other side – that didn’t exist.

And he built it. The idea was to be able to simply open a Linux terminal in/on a browser.

Around the same time, on LinuxForums, Lakshmipathi met Freston, who is an engineer from the Netherlands. They started building together. Their entire coordination happened like this:

$ screen -x chat

They typed into the same shared terminal session. That was the communication channel for 5 years. It wasn't until 2015 that they saw each other's faces for the first time.

If you looked at Webminal's tech stack today, you’d be visibly confused. Python 2.7. Flask 0.12.5. Shellinabox, which stopped being maintained in 2017. User Mode Linux, which Jeff Dike wrote in 2001. Pure HTML with inline CSS.

“ Every tech conference talk would tell you this stack is wrong. But it serves 500k users and has been up for 15 years.” – Lakshmipathi.

The reason for using User Mode Linux instead of Docker is that Docker isn't real enough. When you teach disk partitioning — fdisk, LVM, RAID, mkfs — a student needs actual block devices. UML gives each user a completely independent Linux kernel, four virtual block devices, 256MB of memory, and a copy-on-write overlay. It's from 2001 and it does something modern containers still can't.

There were months when Lakshmipathi was between jobs and the server bill kept arriving. He'd sit with his savings and think about whether this was the month he finally shut it down. Then he'd find work, and the thought would go away, and the server would run another year.

The people using Webminal are mostly students, a lot of them in India, at colleges where the computer lab runs Windows, where a VM would require hardware they don't have. Most of them can't afford $4 a month. So the platform has stayed free for fifteen years. Funded, for most of that time, out of one person's pocket.

The Grant

The 8 lakh grant splits into two parts: 6 lakh as a developer stipend so Lakshmipathi can work on Webminal full-time, and 2 lakh toward infrastructure costs – the server bills that have been coming out of his own pocket for fifteen years. The milestones include – First, modernizing the codebase: moving off Python 2.7, cleaning up secrets that were hardcoded into the config, building a dashboard that shows students what they've actually completed. Second, expanding what the platform can teach. Jupyter notebooks, PostgreSQL access, hands-on tutorials for nginx and containers, with checks that stop a student from advancing until a step genuinely works. Third, a Linux kernel programming course. Fourth, features for scale — letting professors track a whole classroom's progress, a version colleges can host themselves, and outreach to universities that don't know Webminal exists yet. The infrastructure money just keeps the lights on while all of that happens.

Please read more about Webminal’s story here. You can contribute to Webminal financially through GitHub Sponsors.

If you’re an Indian FOSS project looking for support, please apply here. Find information about the grants program and previous grantees at https://fossunited.org/grants.

If you’re an organisation interested in contributing back to the ecosystem, please reach out to us at maintainers@fossunited.org

Two weeks into being Programs Intern at FOSS United, and I was at my first conference of this scale. Walking in, it's a lot.  Hundreds of people who all seem to know each other, or at least know of each other, in the specific way open source folks do. There's an expectation of networking that I wasn't fully prepared for. Small talk has never been my strongest suit.

But it turned out to be genuinely nice. A lot of these conversations reminded me why this work matters in the first place.

Open source is tireless work. It gets recognition, sure. Just nowhere near what it deserves.

Seeing Linus Torvalds in person, two weeks into open source work, was a bit surreal, git is such foundational infrastructure. He barely codes now, by his own admission, more development lead than programmer. His real job is conflict resolution: using git merge to understand how thousands of contributions fit. Scaling Linux, he made clear, isn't about tools. It's people, and trusting them to make the call.

The Open Source Innovation Powering India's Digital Public Infrastructure Panel discussion led me onto reading about DPIs (Digital Public Infrastructure). Radha from Networks for Humanity talked about something called DD. Think of it like DNS, but for identity credentials instead of websites. The pitch was open infrastructure that lets networks actually talk to each other, instead of everyone building their own walled version of the same thing.

Digiyatra, in the panel, was an interesting showcase. The data itself is fully decentralized, no central database sitting somewhere collecting everyone's info. But the credentials running on top of it are still proprietary. DPI at scale, apparently, is full of these tradeoffs.

An interesting fun parallel to draw from Ansh’s talk on Strengthening India’s FOSS Community was about FOSS in India tying back to older ideas – swadeshi, self-reliance, who actually gets to own the tools a country runs on.

The Panel Discussion A Balancing Act: OSPOs in Action Within BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance) one was a good reminder that "banks love open source" and "banks can actually use open source easily" are two very different sentences. The panel had OSPO(Open Source Program Offices) heads from NatWest, HDFC, and Linux Foundation. BFSI orgs aren't resistant to open source, they're just operating in a space where every dependency needs a compliance trail.

Closed out the two days with the Women & Non-Binary in Open Source Gathering. It felt oddly nice, after two days of moving through rooms where men made up an obvious majority, which is open source, sure, no surprises there. Just being in a room where women and non-binary folks were sharing their stories, their experience of navigating a space that's still very male-dominated, was insightful.

It was heartwarming to hear everyone talk about what inspired them to contribute to this landscape. The conversations weren't just the usual networking small talk. Technical insights, sure, but also real conversation around what it actually means to be a woman or a non-binary person in this space.

I came in expecting a bunch of talks about code. I left with a lot more thoughts about the people behind it – which, in hindsight, feels a bit more interesting personally. Good first conference.

We are excited to award a grant of INR 3 Lakhs to Scrite, an open source, cross-platform screenwriting app. The grant will support server hosting, software licensing, code signing certificates, and legal document reviews for the project through 2027.

Structure, Order, Method

Sometime in December 2019, Prashanth was trying his hand at writing, writing screenplays particularly. While rewriting a screenplay, he started to feel that the app he was using was not keeping up with the way he imagined the story.

" In my head, stories show up in a particular shape. More specifically, the story shows up as an arrangement of elements, which arrangement has a shape. This is what I would like to call structure. A specific way of sequencing elements from the structure is what I would call a screenplay. While the existing apps helped me with writing the screenplay, I couldn’t find anything that helped me capture the structure." – Prashanth

He decided to write a simple desktop app for his own use, to capture the structure and to help with writing the screenplay itself.

Scrite is born

On 24th March 2020, when the country went into lockdown; stranded with nowhere to go for 21 days, he decided to stop rewriting his screenplay and build the app instead.

Cut to today, and Scrite has around 50,000 people writing in it, with close to 2,000 paid users. Currently, it supports English and a growing list of Indian languages: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Sanskrit, and Assamese, with French, Vietnamese, and Japanese joining soon. Some of the films written in it have made it to festival screens.

What Built the Community

Screenwriting apps for the Indian market aren't as rare as just half-hearted about it. Language support usually meant a font pack; writers still ended up typing in transliterated English and converting later, breaking their flow.

Scrite went after a specific friction: type phonetically and watch it turn into Tamil or Kannada or Hindi script in real time. Writers who'd been living with the workaround recognized the fix immediately and told other writers. A production house in Bengaluru moved its entire writing staff over from a legacy tool. The Screenwriters Association gave Scrite a platform to demo to its members, and the writers who attended stayed.

There's a broader truth in here too, one that shows up in a lot of long-running open-source projects: growth rarely comes from chasing an audience. It comes from solving something real for a small group of people first, and everything after that tends to depend less on strategy than on which people you happen to run into along the way. It was building for a problem nobody else was taking seriously, and staying open enough to let the right people find it.

This grant will help Prashanth sustain Scrite’s infrastructure for the next year, so he can focus on building the product and a community around it. Prashanth has been an active part of the FOSS United community. Check out his talk at IndiaFOSS 2025 and this post where he mentions how the community helped him in his journey.

For most of its life, the FOSS United platform has been built by a handful of familiar hands. That is the quiet reality of a lot of community software: a few people carry it, month after month, because they care & get paid. It works, but it is fragile. A project is only as healthy as the number of people who can comfortably walk in and start helping.

June was the month a few new people walked in. And the first thing one of them did was make it easier for the next person to walk in after them.

Jasil Faras, contributing for the first time (as FOSS Hack 2026 contribution), did not start with a flashy feature. He wrote a seed script: a small piece of code that fills a fresh install with sample chapters, events, CFPs, and hackathons. If you have ever set up a new project and stared at an empty screen wondering "now what do I even click", you know exactly why this matters. A new contributor can now run the setup and immediately see a platform that looks alive, with real-looking data to poke at. Jasil also added more test factories, the plumbing that lets us write reliable tests without a lot of boilerplate. Unglamorous, deeply useful work.

bench execute fossunited.dev.seed.seed inside apps/fossunited directory, and you'll have all small replica of fossunited in your local setup, read more.

James Reilly, also a first-time contributor, worked on the same theme from another angle. He set up a proper local development flow, the kind where you run one command (just demo) and the whole thing comes up end to end, waiting patiently for the database to be ready before it does its thing. Less "it works on my machine", more "it works on yours too".

We are a small non-profit. We cannot pay our way to a bigger team. What we can do is make the door wider and the welcome warmer, so that people who want to contribute their time can actually do so without fighting the setup for a whole evening. June was a good month for that door. To Jasil, James, and Jeswin: thank you, and welcome.

And the circle grew on the inside too. Big news: I am no longer the only one breaking things in production. Please welcome Siddarth Bansal (@sidd190), our new tech intern. He works across both Forklore and FOSS United, so feel free to poke him with issues, ideas, or that one bug I've been quiet ignoring for three months. His initial work week plan is to rewrite the tech stack of Forklore to keep it simple with minimal SSG, more automation and less maintenance burden, current NuxtJS is kinda overall to maintain the npm depedency hell.

We now show badges on profiles. Hackathon winners carry a winner badge on their profile and project pages. And if your profile username or GitHub link matches a maintainer on Forklore (our directory of Indian FOSS maintainers), a Forklore badge shows up too. Small thing, but recognition is one of the few currencies a community actually runs on.

For event organisers, the CFP reviewing flow got real teeth. You can now assign a proposal to a specific reviewer from the dashboard, and that reviewer gets an email telling them a talk is waiting for their eyes, and who assigned it. Reviewing a conference's worth of proposals is genuinely hard work, and spreading it cleanly across a team is half the battle. Alongside this, CFP forms now close themselves once the deadline passes, no more remembering to manually flip a switch to "Closed".

We've also introduced "Favourite" and "Private comment" on each review for internal circulation and information for Organisers and other reviewers, so show strong preference and interest towards a proposal.

On that note, we removed a switch entirely. There used to be a "Show CFP / Show RSVP" toggle on events. It was redundant and could even contradict reality. Now the logic decides: RSVP shows until the venue is full, CFP shows until the deadline. The system should know these things on its own.

We also took a small pain away from organisers running paid conferences. Approved speakers usually get a free ticket, and sending those coupons one by one is tedious and error-prone. There is now a single button that sends free ticket coupons to every approved speaker, and it is safe to press more than once: it only sends to the people who have not received one yet. Boring on the surface, a real time-saver in practice.

Finally, a bit of spring cleaning. We replaced our hand-maintained rich text editor with the one that comes built into frappe-ui. This deleted close to 480 lines of our own code. As a small team, every line we do not have to maintain ourselves is a line we can spend somewhere that matters more. Leaning on the shared upstream tools, instead of reinventing them, is how a small org stays sane.

That is the state of things in June: a slightly bigger circle of people, a slightly easier path in, and a platform that asks its organisers to do a little less manual work. IndiaFOSS 2026 work continues steadily in the background.

Now, the technical list for those who like the details.

CFP Reviewer Assignment (#1592)

Organisers can assign proposals to specific reviewers from the dashboard. The assigned reviewer gets a custom email (built on Frappe's native assignment notification) noting who assigned it. CFP forms now also auto-close once the deadline passes.

Profile Badges (#1609)

Hackathon winner badges on profile and project pages, plus a Forklore maintainer badge when a profile's username or GitHub matches a Forklore maintainer (partially closes #1279).

Free Ticket Coupons for Speakers (#1605)

One button bulk-sends free ticket coupons to all approved-proposal speakers. Idempotent: re-running only sends to speakers who have not received one yet.

Event Manage Simplification

Removed the redundant "Show CFP / Show RSVP" toggle and the manage tab. Form visibility is now driven by logic: RSVP shows until full, CFP shows until the deadline.

Text Editor: frappe-ui Replacement

Replaced our custom Tiptap editor and comment box with frappe-ui's built-in editor. Near drop-in, ~480 fewer lines for us to maintain.

Local Dev & Seed Data (#1611, #1457)

One-command local demo setup (just demo) from James Reilly, and a developer_mode-guarded seed script that fills a fresh install with sample data from Jasil.

Test Factories (#1622)

Event Grant, Project Grant, and Hackathon Project factories. Credits: Jasil.

IndiaFOSS 2026

Themed devroom pattern banners (design: Ritika - Product Designer, Mecha systems), manual control over the "deadline extended" date, and stats link enabled in the header.

FOSS Hack 2026 Results & Projects

Winner/commendation badges and partner-project links on results, team identity carried onto projects, and issue/PR counts on the projects page so the list can be sorted by activity.

RSVP

A full event now shows a clear "registration full" message instead of a 404, and the RSVP form stays reachable after an event concludes.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

As always, drop suggestions and issues at GitHub or move to Codeberg.

All of this started more than 20 years ago, in college, burning Fedora Core 2 onto six CDs and swapping discs into the drive at midnight to dual boot with Windows. That is how I fell into the GNU/Linux addiction and somewhere along the way I picked up the tag of "the Linux guy" among my friends. In my MCA final year I got campus recruited as the top pick out of 180 students, purely on my Linux skills.

Then came a long, frustrating gap before my joining date. Going to a city like Chennai or Bangalore to look for other jobs was not an option for me because of money, so I decided to build a FOSS project instead, hoping it might help. All I had was a desktop with a Celeron processor and 512MB of RAM. Six months later, I had giis-ext3, a file undelete tool. I learned much later that I could have done it in a couple of weeks using existing libraries, but as a student with very limited internet access, that was not how it went. The nearest cafe was around 20km away, I paid 20 rupees an hour and I carried whatever I downloaded back on floppy disks. So I am perfectly okay with those six months. I uploaded the tool to SourceForge and started sending it along with my resume.

Once I joined work, the job itself did not feel challenging enough, but the open source world had already pulled me in. Getting an email or a comment from someone on the other side of the planet only pumped up the addiction. At the peak of Facebook's popularity, I was on a site called LinuxForums.org, LFo for short and now gone, almost every day answering user questions. This was before Stack Overflow even existed.

The award that changed things

In 2008, my ext3 undelete tool won the FOSSIndia award and got featured in Linux For You magazine. You can see that bit of my story here. giis was written from scratch, without ext2lib, because at the time I did not even know ext2lib existed. That award was one of the turning points of my journey. It told me the work mattered to people other than me.

The friends I met on a forum

LFo is also where I met two people who shaped everything that came after.

One was Elija, whose real name is Richard, from England. He contributed to my file system projects like giis and giis-ext4. The other was Freston, whose real name is Wybrand Wlohman, from the Netherlands. He helped me with the networking part of minili, my 3MB bootable Linux. Both of them gave me their time and effort for free, on projects that had no money and no promise of anything in return.

The idea behind Webminal

Most of my work was on Windows and only a few projects let me touch Linux. Friends kept coming to me with the same question, "how do I get started with Linux commands, our servers are all Linux now."

That question, along with my own frustration of not being able to use Linux whenever I wanted, slowly turned into an idea.

The idea was simple. I was sitting at my Windows machine at work, wanting to learn Linux. What if I could open a browser, practice on a real Linux terminal, gain some confidence and then rotate my chair to the actual Linux machine next to me and start working with zero fear?

That was the whole point. Zero fear of the command line. So the interface had to feel exactly like a real terminal. No "Run" button. No "Execute now" button. Just type the command and get the response, like a real system.

Building it with people I had never met

I shared the web terminal idea with Freston and Elija. Freston was in the Netherlands, Elija (Richard) was in England and I was in India. That is how three people from three countries started building a project for other users. Richard built the frontend and we shipped the first version, webminal-v1. After that Richard had to step away because of the workload from his regular job.

Wybrand (Freston) and I kept going. The way we worked still makes me smile. Both of us would SSH into the same server, open a shared screen session and just chat inside the terminal while we coded. We even worked through New Year's Eve. I still remember Freston and me SSHing into the server a few hours before midnight, both of us at our keyboards while the rest of the world was out celebrating.

Here is something I still find funny. Until 2015, Freston and I had never seen each other's face. Not even on Skype. Everything happened over SSH and a screen session.

Buying a server with a stranger

Until then we were running everything from Wybrand's home system. In 2011 we decided to buy a proper server for the project and split the cost.

Now think about this. I was about to send money to someone I had never seen face to face, never even heard his voice. Friends could not believe I trusted someone online like that. My answer was simple, I had known him for more than four years on the forum. Still, sending around INR 25,000 to a person in the Netherlands felt a little crazy. I did it anyway. And we got our server.

Then the users asked for root

Webminal users started asking for root access. Obviously we could not just hand it out, since it was a shared server with other users' home directories sitting on it.

So we kept exploring. OpenVZ, then UML, later Docker when it arrived, then EC2 spot instances. Over the years we added and removed a lot of things. Through all of it, User Mode Linux stayed. We still use UML today to give each user a real kernel with real block devices, so a student can run fdisk, LVM, RAID and mkfs without any risk to the host machine.

One server that refuses to die

Webminal runs on a single CentOS box with 8GB RAM. No Kubernetes, no microservices, no auto scaling. One server since 2011. It has survived a datacenter fire in 2021 where we lost 150k user accounts, multiple power outages in the Netherlands and the day in 2017 when a Spanish tech blog sent us 10,000 users in a single day.

Along the way the infrastructure moved through a long road. Linode, DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP, OVH, IBM Cloud and back to Linode. Full circle.

How one small server keeps all this running is a story in itself. Python 2.7, Flask, Shellinabox from 2005, User Mode Linux from 2001 for the root labs and a little eBPF counting the commands as they scroll on the homepage. Every conference talk would tell you this stack is wrong, yet it has served 500,000 users for 15 years. I wrote up that technical side separately, if you want the deep dive: 15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users.

I pay the server bill from my savings. Honestly, I have spent more on this project than on a lot of personal and family things.Around 500,000 people have typed their first ls on Webminal. Some of them are sysadmins now. Some run their own servers. As long as it helps even one student, it will keep running.

The other projects along the way

Webminal is the one that stayed alive the longest, but it grew out of a habit of building small tools and I never stopped working on storage and file systems. Over the years I also contributed to Linux file system tools and BTRFS and to kernel file system features like case-insensitive testing. A few interesting projects :

• giis and giis-ext4, file undelete tools for ext3 and ext4.
• extcarve, a semantic file carving tool for forensic recovery.
• dduper, a fast way to dedupe BTRFS files, along with patches to btrfs-progs and xfstests.
• minili, the 3.8MB Linux build that Freston helped me network.
• DistroQA, automated ISO image testing using containers.

You can find the full list at giis.co.in/foss.html and on github.com/lakshmipathi.

Advice to my younger self

If I could tell my younger self one thing, it would be this. It is much easier to contribute to an existing FOSS project than to start one from scratch as your first project. You learn a lot and you gain visibility quickly, by joining something that already has people and momentum. Starting from zero, the way I did with giis, works too, but it is the harder road.

This blog post is part of the "Notes from a Maintainer" series, an effort to highlight the stories of the people behind India's digital commons ecosystem. Read other posts here

In this series of posts, I will talk about Learning to Manage - managing myself as a people manager, learning to manage a team, learning to build an organization and a community, learning to lead, and more. At the end of the day, I’m managing.

Why write about my experience in management? There are many reasons, but the primary one is repetition. Managing a team, in my personal experience, requires talking to the team about the same thing, over and over again, individually and as a group. We could be talking about philosophy, culture, mental models, frameworks, heuristics, or more. And everything is repeated multiple times because rewiring people’s minds to think differently takes time.

Let’s start with how we strive to build a common foundation for everyone within the team. One of the first things I did as soon as I started at the Foundation was create a “FOSS Reading Material” Mattermost channel to share “mandatory” reading material with the team. The Foundation staff had a few quirks - the team was young, the Foundation was their first and only experience with the FOSS ecosystem for most of them, and the Foundation was also the first job for most. I wanted to ensure that the team could at least learn through osmosis, so I shared the writings of people steeped in the Indian and Global FOSS ecosystem.

I shared posts by Armin Ronacher, creator of Python FOSS projects like Flask, Jinja2, and more, and I shared the talk on Technical leadership and glue work by Tanya Reilly, which is especially relevant given that most of the work we do at the Foundation is glue work for the Indian FOSS ecosystem. We read the influential Roads and Bridges report by Nadia Eghbal (Nadia Asparouhova). The report, though originally published in 2016, is still surprisingly relevant to understanding the dynamics of the FOSS ecosystem. You might also recognize her from her influential book Working in Public or the guide to financial support for open source that she maintains. I shared a post by Brett Cannon, Python core developer, on Saying thanks to Open Source Maintainers. To understand the value of project management in FOSS projects, I shared a keynote by Sumana Harihareswara. We discussed the Miranda Heath report on Burnout in Open Source Software, and we also watched the talk by Leonard Richardson, creator of Beautiful Soup, on how to maintain a popular python package for most of your life ~~without~~ with burning out.

To understand the Indian scenario, we read the State of FOSS in India report by CivicDataLab, the Analysis of FOSS Government Policies in India by Apar Gupta, the IT for Change policy brief on ICTs in School Education - Outsourced vs integrated approach, and the 2009 Study in India on the Economic impact of FOSS by Prof. Rahul De, IIMB. Later in the year, we started the Articles We Love forum category and shared articles/reports and summaries publicly.

Other team members slowly hopped on the wagon. For example, Ansh shared Balancing makers and takers to scale and sustain open source by Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, Mangesh shared the Write the Docs documentation best practices, and Siddharth shared the Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) Development syllabus at RIT, to name a few, and over time, the FOSS Reading Material evolved into the Digital Commons Reading Material.

For the young software team specifically, I shared Choose Boring Technology, and the concept of innovation tokens, and I shared articles on how to write code that reviewers will love and on how to review code as a human, although the last part might not be relevant in 2026 if AI is writing much of your code or if you’re relying on AI for reviews. We discussed the blameless postmortem culture and lessons learned in 35 years of making software, and we watched Rethinking the Developer Career Path by Randall Koutnik to gain a better understanding of our technical work and how we grow professionally.

This is only a small fraction of what we shared and discussed internally to build and sustain a common foundation for the staff. Some of these references came up independently in recent conversations, validating their timelessness. Life came full circle when a person I interviewed recently mentioned that the “Roads and Bridges” report helped her understand the FOSS/Digital Commons ecosystems. And the reading list grows every month, for as long as people from the digital commons ecosystems pen their thoughts and experiences, and we will continue reading to ensure that our understanding of the digital commons is larger than our own individual lived experiences within it.

Finally, over time, it’s important to understand that the shared foundations become shared abstractions. For instance, “being glue” is all I need to say to bring up the importance of glue work, “roads and bridges” is sufficient to bring up the importance of FOSS digital infrastructure, getting unstuck is short for project management advice for open source projects, and “solution implementer - problem solver - problem finder” is short for rethinking the developer career path.

What timeless FOSS/Digital Commons reading material have you come across? Please consider sharing it with us. And keep tuning in to the FOSS United blog to check in on how i’m Learning to Manage.

IndiaFOSS 2026 (#1595)

• The IndiaFOSS 2026 landing page is live. Has the full sponsor listing, program details, devrooms section listing all conference devrooms with their organisers and Timeline section for event tracking.

• Design assets by Jeswin Josu.

• Visit: fossunited.org/indiafoss/2026 (go grab IndiaFOSS 2026 tickets now)

Maintainers May (#1581)

• Landing page for Maintainers May is up. Lists all the city meetups happening across India this month as part of the campaign.

City Community Map

• The communities page now has an India map with all FOSS United chapters plotted by city. Good way to see how spread out the community actually is. (Kerala is doing the most, unsurprisingly.)

Post-Event Feedback (#1579)

• After an event ends, attendees now automatically get an email with a feedback link. Now the scheduler handles it.

• Note: This feedback is only read by FOSS United staff and is not distributed to organizers, so feel free to share as much feedback for us to improve and know more.

Jobs Board: Search + Filters (#1572)

• The jobs listing page now has a search bar and category filter. Also added a closed_on date field so archived listings show when the position was actually closed rather than just disappearing.

Buy Tickets: Slot Count + Billing Summary (#1599)

Two additions to the ticket purchase flow:

• Remaining ticket slot shown per tier on the selection step - useful when slots are limited (go grab IndiaFOSS 2026 tickets now).
• Billing step now has a summary panel on the right showing your full order (tiers, attendees, t-shirts, total) without needing to scroll to final step only.

Speaker Form Pre-fill

• CFP speaker form is now pre-filled from your FOSS United profile and from user's recent submission. Repeat speakers don't have to re-enter everything from scratch.

Ticketing: T-shirt Bundled Tiers

• Higher-price tiers can now have a t-shirt included in the price (not as a separate add-on). Tracked properly in the backend so organisers can manage sizes and delivery per tier. IndiaFOSS contributor ticket is the first use of this.

Subscribe to upcoming Events in Your Calendar

• You can now subscribe to all upcoming FOSS United events directly in your calendar app — no more checking the website manually. Events auto-refresh hourly, so anything new shows up automatically.

• Subscribe using this ICS feed URL:

  https://fossunited.org/api/method/fossunited.api.chapter.upcoming_events_ics

• Shown in Timeline page and further help on RSS and staying updated.

Test Suite Refactoring (#1593, #1585, #1584, #1583)

• Factory-based test pattern is now consistent across ticketing, user profiles, hackathon, and free ticket tests. More deterministic, less boilerplate per test. All credits to Harsh Tandiya for the patient work here.

Docs (#1588, #1580)

• Incident response checklist got a clarity pass, clubs overview updated. Credits: Siddharth.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · Docs page

As always, drop suggestions and issues at GitHub thread or Codeberg.

I document and archive languages spoken by South Asian communities. In this region, we speak over 800 languages. Since most of the remaining languages are spoken rather than written, documenting them in audio and video formats is critical to their promotion and preservation. I am not a developer but a steward, and have been maintaining the FOSS required by many such languages.

There are two large areas where language technology support is poorer: script-related support for local languages with scripts, and support for the rest of the languages, since their issues are not well documented.

Emerging tools

OpenSpeaks Subtitler in action (Subhashish Panigrahi / CC BY-SA 4.0)

At OpenSpeaks, we maintain a small suite of open-source projects focused on multilingual audio-visual media, metadata, and documentation. These tools include: Subtitler (repo), an audio and video caption/subtitle editor; Tome (repo), a metadata editor; and Bento (repo), a media file and folder organiser, duration calculator, and media converter. These web apps are intended to work offline (with limited functionality) or over slow internet connections, allowing field documenters to use them on the go. Internally, we use many other open-source tools and utilities for automation, file management, and administrative purposes. Previously, we have created many other open-source tools, both at OpenSpeaks and at O Foundation, our parent organisation, mostly related to language technology.

Chapakala

Chapakala is an open-source Odia typeface revival project that Nasim Ali and I started in 2024. Chapakala19 revives a 19th-century workhorse typeface, and Chapakala 20 revives a similar 20th-century workhorse typeface. This is arguably the first full-fledged typeface revival project in Odia and will help reproduce old text, create new artistic and other designs, and improve optical character recognition (OCR) software. Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine, has not been trained for Odia since 2009 and has never been trained for letterpress-era fonts. Over 15,000 digitally archived books remain almost inaccessible due to a lack of OCR training.

Past projects

There are several open-source, open knowledge and open data projects I have built, co-created, largely contributed to, and maintained in the past. Some are not maintained or archived; some are maintained by others; some I continue to maintain; and some are included in larger projects. Some of these projects include:

Transliteration, Lekhani and OdiScript input methods

A handful of us were involved in reviving the nine-year-dormant Odia Wikipedia in early 2011. The earliest contributors, us, were not fluent in typing in InScript, an input method made by the Indian government. Enter transliteration, an intuitive near-phonetic input method. I worked closely with Junaid P.V., a developer and a Malayalam Wikimedian who had already mapped the Odia characters to Malayalam and many other Indian scripts. It was included in the Narayam input method extension in MediaWiki, the wiki software behind Wikipedia, among others, and later became a part of the official Wikimedia input methods called Universal Language Selector (ULS). As our contribution grew, we realised we were typing more and needed a phonetic keyboard optimised for Odia. I led the development of the Lekhani input method. It drew inspiration from Oriya phonetic typing in Ubuntu and the Oriya-QUERTY keyboard on macOS. Most of us switched to Lekhani immediately, and it remains the most widely used Odia input method on Wikimedia projects to date. I also worked on making Lekhani work on the now-defunct Firefox OS and macOS. The Indic Keyboard Android app also included Lekhani and Transliteration. Together with Manoj Sahukar, I also co-created OdiaScript, an Odia input method based on the popular Modular input method.

A FirefoxOS phone showing Lekhani input method (Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi / CC BY-SA 4.0)

OpenSpeaks Data Pages

Speech synthesis has always fascinated me as a technology. During 2014-2015, I reviewed the quality of eSpeak, an open-source speech synthesiser for Odia, as part of a Centre for Internet and Society project. While eSpeak remains one of the oldest and most widely used text-to-speech systems for Indian languages, its synthesised voice sounds unnatural and is hard to use for long periods. Though it’s possible to build high-quality speech synthesis models with less data now, training speech synthesis models requires a lot of voice data. We also brought the Odia Wiktionary to life, a dictionary with meanings in many languages. Shitikantha Dash, a fellow Wikimedian, helped add over 100K headwords from the 1930–1941 lexicon Purnnachandra Ordia Bhashakosha. I started recording words to add pronunciations to Wiktionary and build a dataset for a future ASR project. Then, I started a project called Kathabhidhana based on a Python script written by Shrinivasan T. Later, open-source projects Lingua Libre, where I was a top contributor across all the languages supported at the time, and Mozilla Common Voice made this process easier. This project, with over 78,000 recordings, became the largest Odia voice dataset to be published with a Public Domain release. It was later archived in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital records while serving over 21,000 pages on Wiktionary.

Encoding converters in Odia

Legacy typefaces with ASCII or ISCII that predate the Unicode standard have long been used across Indian scripts, especially in the printing industry. Though Odia (then Oriya) was encoded in the Unicode standard in 1991, the publishing and broadcasting industries did not adopt Unicode-compliant typefaces for nearly three decades. In fact, many publishers continue to use legacy ASCII typefaces to date. The Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities struggled to extract text from content typed in such typefaces. Most Indian languages underwent a major shift, with digital and online content available in Unicode, while print and broadcast typesetting used fonts in legacy encodings. Companies that built fonts had their own proprietary encoding; sometimes, a single company made changes to the encoding with each release. So, encoding converters were built to ensure users could convert legacy text to Unicode.

Srujanika, a nonprofit based in Bhubaneswar, took the first step toward creating an Odia encoding converter. We, the Odia Wikimedia community, needed to access e-book and e-newspaper content. So, we built encoding converters and released them publicly as open source software. I was involved in co-creating (with Jnanaranjan Sahu, who built the most stable version of a converter, Manoj Sahukar, and Shitikantha Dash), testing, creating user guides, and promoting the converters publicly. As a result, we saw a significant increase in Unicode content first on social media, then on-wiki, and in many other places. I continue to maintain many of these converters. Most type foundries that the print industry relies on have released their own encoding converters.

Other tools

Ol Chiki (Santali-language script) keyboard layout for Sarjom Baha input method (Photo: Pooja Saxena and Subhashish Panigrahi / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Project Ol Chiki: I developed and coordinated this project at Access to Knowledge (A2K), a programme at the Centre for Internet and Society. In collaboration with Santali-language experts Damayanti Beshra, Malati and Mangat Murmu, Kuanra Murmu and Raj Narayan Marndi, we created an open-source font (designed by Pooja Saxena) and an input method (developed by Jnanaranjan Sahu and Nasim Ali). I maintained the tools till the Santali Wikimedians took control of the project. Guru Gomke, the font and Sarjom Baha, the input method, continued to be widely used

Growing up, I was always driven by a desire to learn, figure things out, and build things that matter. For a long time, that drive had a very specific destination in my mind. Like many who want to create systemic, wide-reaching change in India, being an IAS officer was my dream.

But when I graduated in 2008 with a degree in Information Systems, the immediate trajectory took me straight into the proprietary corporate tech machine.

My first role involved working on build and release systems for closed-source software. It was a fantastic engineering foundation, but it left me with a lingering question that tied right back to my original dream: How can I use this immense power of software for the public good?

By 2012, that question became too loud to ignore. I took a leap into the unknown, left the corporate world, and supported myself through freelance translation just to give myself the space to explore. That was when I discovered the world of open-source tools and community-driven ecosystems like Wikipedia, Wikimaps, and OpenStreetMap (OSM).

Seeing how everyday citizens, armed with open tools and data, could actively shape disaster response, infrastructure, and urban planning changed everything for me. I realized that public service didn't have to look like a traditional bureaucratic career. FOSS isn’t just a development methodology rather it is a vehicle for public equity at a massive scale.

Geospatial world

In 2015, as mobile internet exploded across India and location intelligence startups began cropping up, I stepped full-time into the geospatial sector. I tried everything in the geospatial domain from data generation to data engineering, community training, and field operations. I learned about the geospatial world from the ground up.

When the company I was working for closed its India operations, I was offered a relocation to the US. It was a tempting corporate safety net, but I chose to decline it to stay close to my family. That choice redirected my career in the best way possible. In 2018, I joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) as a remote backend consultant.

Scaling FOSS Products

Over the years, my role evolved from writing code to shaping global product strategy. Today, I primarily serve as a Product Manager at HOTOSM, owning the roadmap for tools that operate at scale:

Managing these platforms comes with a unique, exciting constraint: we have no in-house engineering team, which means my day-to-day involves managing the full vendor lifecycle from procurement and contracting to coordinating external contributor teams across multiple time zones.

In parallel, I get to operate as the Operations and Product Lead for MapLibre, an open-source nonprofit providing cutting-edge mapping libraries. Here, I manage and coordinate with a global governing board, handle sponsor relations, and guide community engagement.

My core philosophy

What I love most about this work is how it bridges the gap between high-level technology and raw, human reality. My job has taken me to places across the world to conduct pilot training and drone mobilization.

Interestingly, my professional work has bled into my personal downtime. I’ve become an avid drone flyer. There is something profoundly beautiful about switching between a bird’s-eye view of a terrain and the close-up, human reality on the ground.

In many ways, my core philosophy on technology stems from the Brazilian film City of God. The movie details the realities of an informal settlement in Rio de Janeiro, but its soul lies in the character of Rocket, a young boy who escapes that cycle of violence entirely through the power of a camera lens. That film has always stayed with me because it serves as the ultimate proof of my deepest conviction that access to tools and information changes the trajectory of lives.

What’s Next?

My FOSS journey has been anything but linear. It required intentional pauses, turning down traditional corporate safety nets, and learning how to lead with empathy across diverse cultures.

As I look to the future, my ultimate goal is to evolve this experience into a sustainable, mission-driven organization that champions civic tech and open digital infrastructure on a global scale.

The childhood dream of public service never left me, it just evolved. By being in FOSS, I get to serve communities not just locally, but globally.

Story and insights by Ramya Ragupathy; copy editing and language refinement assisted by Gemini.

Six years later, Scrite has been used by ~50k users and we are nearing ~2k paid subscribers. It supports screenwriting in English and several Indian languages, and is now adding French, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Films written in Scrite have made it to festivals. Writers share their work on social media. People compare it to Final Draft. I mean, THE FINAL DRAFT.

None of that felt inevitable when I was hacking together the first prototype. And a significant chunk of the growth in the last couple of years, I can trace directly back to FOSS United and the community around it.

This is the story of five specific things that happened because I showed up.

The GitHub Panic and the Refactor

Sometime in mid 2025, Scrite got listed in the FOSS United Forklore directory.

I noticed a sudden surge in GitHub activity. New eyes on the code, people asking questions I hadn't been asked before.

I started panicking.

The thing is, Scrite started as a prototype. A personal project I built in a lockdown to scratch my own itch. At some point, prototype became production software. And along the way, I had collected one too many hacks. The kind of code you write when you're moving fast and promising yourself you'll clean it up later. Well, later had arrived.

Getting approved for a talk at IndiaFOSS was what finally forced my hand. Nothing like a public commitment to make you actually do the thing. I used the deadline as a forcing function and spent the months before the conference doing a serious refactor and rewrite of large parts of the codebase.

The result was Scrite Version 2.0, which released in Jan 2026. Better performance, cleaner internals, new features. The fear factor worked. I'm not sure I'd have done it otherwise.

Kailash's Talk and the Alar API

Scrite has supported Indian language input from the very beginning. That was Director Abhaya Simha's doing, really. When I showed him the first version, his immediate question was: does it support Kannada? That one question set the direction.

But what we had for a long time was fairly basic. You'd switch the input method, type in your script, and Scrite would handle the font and rendering. It worked, but it wasn't particularly elegant.

At MangaloreFOSS, I attended a talk by Kailash about Alar, a Kannada-English dictionary and transliteration API.

Something clicked. I went back and integrated the Alar HTTP REST API into Scrite's language input system. Now, as a writer types phonetically in English, Scrite fetches transliteration suggestions from Alar and shows them in a small popup. The writer picks the right word and keeps going.

That was the obvious use case. But then I got some interesting feedback. It turns out, some actors prefer reading Kannada dialogue in phonetic English rather than in the Kannada script. They're more comfortable with it, and it's easier to learn lines that way. So I've been meaning to build reverse transliteration: using the Alar dictionary to automatically convert Kannada text back into phonetic English. A writer writes in Kannada, an actor reads it in English. Same words, different script.

The idea for this feature implementation came directly from a talk I went to because I showed up at a conference. I hadn't gone looking for it. It found me.

The Designer and Twenty Years of GUI Eyes

I have been writing GUI applications since 2001. You'd think that after twenty years I'd have decent design instincts. I didn't, really. I just had developer eyes, which is a very different thing.

At one of the FOSS United events, I met Jeswin, a designer. We ended up chatting for a while. He looked at Scrite's UI and said something simple: your icons are all from different families. Pick one family and stick to it.

That was it. That was the whole insight. One hour, one conversation, and it fixed something I had been looking at for years without seeing. I went back and replaced all the icons with a consistent set from the same family.

The difference was immediately visible, and the feedback from users reflected it.

I think about that conversation a lot. Twenty years of building GUIs and it took a designer at a FOSS conference to tell me something I should have known. The community gives you things you didn't know you were missing.

A Samosa Break and the Help Center

At another FOSS United event, during a samosa and coffee break, someone mentioned MKDocs. That one offhand conversation led to something that has genuinely changed how I handle support.

I rebuilt Scrite's user guide as a markdown-based site using MKDocs.

The nice thing about MKDocs is that it generates a JSON search index alongside the site.

Once I had that, I built a Help Center directly into Scrite, triggered by pressing F1. It queries the user guide index and surfaces relevant articles right inside the app, without the user having to leave what they're doing or open a browser.

Support tickets dropped noticeably after that. Writers found answers themselves. The ones who did write in were asking more specific, more interesting questions. It's one of those features that sounds small but has a disproportionate impact on both the user experience and on my own time.

All of it came from a break-time conversation.

Interns, PDFs, and On-Device AI

Through FOSS United, I got connected with IIIT Delhi and was able to engage interns to work on two problems I had been putting off for a long time.

The first was PDF import. A lot of screenwriters receive scripts as PDFs, and there was no good way to bring those into Scrite. The interns have built a command line utility to parse PDF screenplays and convert them to the Fountain format, which Scrite can then import. It's not accurate, but they have done an excellent job of exploring potential approaches.

The second was on-device AI summaries. Writers often work on long scripts and need to quickly recall what a scene is about, or what a particular character has done so far. The second team of interns built support for running a local Ollama instance to generate scene and character summaries without sending any data to the cloud. Privacy-first, which matters a lot to writers working on unproduced material. Again, its not entirely functional but has enough potential to eventually make it to the app.

I've been thinking about the next step, which is feeding those AI summaries into image generators to give writers instant storyboards. Early days, but the foundation is there.

Neither of these would have happened without the FOSS United network. I didn't have the bandwidth to do them myself, and I wouldn't have known where to find the right people.

A Lawyer and Patent Troll Defense

This one I hadn't expected at all.

Through FOSS United, I met a lawyer named Biju. I hadn't really thought about Scrite's legal posture, to be honest. Terms of use, privacy policy, that sort of thing had been sitting on a vague to-do list for a while. Biju will now be able to do a proper review and help us with that.

More importantly, he helped Scrite sign up with the LOT and Open Invention Network.

LOT & OIN are community-based patent non-aggression pact. Members cross-license their patents to each other and collectively defend against frivolous patent trolls. For a small open-source project that has started gaining real visibility, that kind of protection matters more than I had realised.

I had been thinking about FOSS United primarily as a technical community. The fact that it also connects you with legal expertise was a genuine surprise and a genuinely useful one.

The Pat on the Back

I want to mention one more thing, which is harder to quantify but no less real.

Building something for six years, mostly with a small team, can get lonely. There are stretches where you're deep in a refactor nobody sees, or handling support tickets at 11pm, or trying to figure out pricing for a market you don't fully understand.

Kailash, Rahul, Ansh, Shree, Jeswin and many from FOSS United, at different points, said encouraging things about Scrite and about the possibility of grants and support.

“In less than 10 years, make Scrite the global gold standard.” - Kailash Nadh

“We’d be happy to consider a grant proposal from Scrite” - Rahul Poruri

“Scrite should be a partner project at FOSSHack2026” - Ansh Arora

Those conversations didn't change any code or ship any features. But they mattered. Knowing that people whose work you respect are paying attention and rooting for you, that does something to your energy levels.

The community pat on the back is real!

What I'd Tell Someone Starting Out

If you are building something open source and you are not plugged into FOSS United, you are leaving a lot on the table.

Not because the community will do the work for you. It won't. But because the right conversation at the right time, with the right person, can unblock something you've been stuck on for months. A designer at a conference fixed my icons. A break-time chat about documentation changed how I handle support. An intern connection gave me features I couldn't build alone. A lawyer I'd never have found otherwise protected my project from patent risk.

None of these were planned. All of them happened because I showed up, gave talks, attended sessions, and talked to people.

Scrite is what it is today partly because of the code I wrote, and partly because of the community I found. I'm grateful for both.

What's Next?

The journey continues. A few things I'm working towards:

We are applying for a grant with FOSS United to help fund some of Scrite's running costs: server infrastructure, certificates, software licenses. These are the invisible costs that every open-source project eventually has to reckon with, and it's encouraging that there is a structure in place to help with exactly this.

I'll keep attending the monthly meetups, participating in forums, and listening. Some of the best things that have happened to Scrite came from conversations I wasn't looking for. That's reason enough to keep showing up.

Call for Action: Join FOSSUnited!

I want to be honest about something. Every time I attend a FOSS United meetup or conference, I find myself in the company of people who are orders of magnitude smarter and wiser than I can hope to be. And yet it never feels intimidating. It feels nurturing. That's a rare thing, and it's worth naming.

There is always something to learn. Whether from Anoop and the team behind Bruno, or Vishnu and the team behind Ente, or from speakers like Rajendran of OpenAlgo, Nilesh Trivedi of QwikBuild, Shree, Anand, and many many more. Every meetup I come back with something I didn't have before, an idea, a tool, a contact, a perspective.

The team at FOSS United is working to build a comprehensive community structure to support FOSS activity across India. Whether you want to keep your project purely open source, or explore monetisation, or build a for-profit enterprise around it, the support structure, the resource pool, the experience, and most importantly the intent to help, is real.

And it's not just for adults. My 14 year old son started learning Blender at 10. At FOSS United events he has given a talk, conducted a workshop, received a grant, delivered another talk, and just published a full Blender Basics course in Kannada. That journey is a full post, and maybe he will write it. But the short version is: the community works at any age.

The more we participate, the more we discover ways to make things better for future contributors to come. Come, let's build something larger together.

Prashanth Udupa is a software developer, trainer, and open-source creator based in Bengaluru. He is the creator of Scrite. You can watch the full talk on YouTube. Check out his profile on forklore.in