Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia, Netherlands, Tajikistan, UK, Ireland, Ukraine, Germany, Switzerland, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, China, Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Brazil, Greece, US, Australia, Chile, Slovakia, Slovenia, Georgia, Austria, Morocco, Namibia, India and Canada.
In the span of 7 days, those are the different countries which I met people from. Suffice to say, it was a delightful experience. A heartfelt thanks to all the organizers and volunteers for giving us this avenue to meet, greet, understand and grow. I’ll leave Iacopo’s tweet here:
TL;DR:
- I was in Italy from the 1st to 10th of April attending DjangoCon Europe.
- I was one of the 10 coaches for DjangoGirls.
- I presented a workshop called Demystifying the Django REST Framework.
- Made new friends and met old ones.
- Embarrassed myself at the speaker’s dinner by not being able to enjoy a genuine Italian cuisine (I ate the dessert though!).
- A few of us went for the barefoot walk at the Cascine park.
- It was quite a pleasant surprise to know that I was sharing my hotel room with Humphrey Butau.
- One of the highlights of the event was coincidentally sitting next to one of my first Django mentors, Funkybob during the dev sprints.
- Patiently working on and waiting for my documentation PRs for Django to be merged.
- I enjoyed Florence, visited Pisa and Milan (meeting one of my best buddies from college).
- Realized I was dangerously close to being stagnant in terms of technology.
- Realized there was a tonne I could to help people in my own home town vicinity with the knowledge I have.
- Taking a hiatus from conference speaking abroad to use that time and money and get myself technically strong.
- Someone told me I had become complacent, which I think has truth in it due to a few recent life experiences.
- If you have my card, send me a hi!
Proposal acceptance and the Visa process
After Iacopo told me around the last week of January 2017 that he’d like to have me present my proposal as a workshop at the conference, I was on cloud 9. It took a while to get the Visa process started. A special thanks to Elizabeth from Chinnocio for helping me with the Visa.
I guess the stars were not aligned and I could only get a date at the VFS on 21st March at Mumbai to submit my Visa application even though my flight tickets were already booked for 31st March. I never had a problem with any of my Visas before, but this time they decided to put a personal interview on 27th Morning.
Flew to Mumbai for 2nd time a week spending 20K (thanks Sanjay for letting me crash at your place!) and met possibly the first Italian in my life. A very kind, gracious and friendly man with whom I had the following conversation:
1. He looks at my salary invoices and bank statement.
Him: “These numbers don’t match”.
Me: “That’s how salaries work. There is a 10% Tax Deduction at source and we only get the rest.”
Him: “You expect me to do calculations? This doesn’t look like your salary to me. Where did you say you work again?”
Me: “Akshara Foundation – an NGO that works in the education space in Karnataka.”
Him: “An NGO? Like a Trust, right? You guys get Tax cuts and stuff right?”
Me: “…. Well, I am not sure about that. I am just a developer…”
Him: “I have to check if this… Akshara is real.. your salary doesn’t match, your employment contract doesn’t mention anything about the raise you got as well.”
2. He moves onto my Graduation certificate.
Him: “So you’re a Computer Science Engineer. Then why are working on websites? Seems like a very low job for your qualification.”
Me: “… I build websites… umm…”
3. Then he takes a look at the invitation letter from DjangoCon Europe and the copy of Iacopo’s passport.
Him: “I don’t know if we can accept this… It is simply a printout. I’ve never heard of DjangoCon Europe… How many people attend this?”
Me: “I guess around 250 – 300…?”
Him: “See? They have not mentioned it and you don’t seem sure too… How do I know if this is a real conference?”
Me: “Uh…? You can check the website… The organizers have sent the embassy a direct email…”
Him: “You have a printout of the email?”
Me: “No… I am sure if you check your mail you should be able to find it.”
Him: “No no… I will need a printout. I am still not sure… I’ll have to check about all of this. Okay you can go now.”
That sort of sums up the conversation. It didn’t help skipping breakfast and reaching there early so as to not miss my 9:00AM slot. Had to wait until 11:30AM before they called me in though. By the time I stepped out after this interview, I sincerely prayed they would just reject it already so that I wouldn’t have to go through all of this.
By this time, I had troubled Emanuela enough to send me all the receipts for the hotel booking and even new invitation letters. When I mentioned about this interview to her, I guess all of them got slightly angry and talked to their lawyer about the matter.
I reached back home on 28th morning and started looking into ticket cancellations. The stars again didn’t quite align. Suffice to say that even though the ticket was deemed “refundable”, the airlines informed me that the cancellations charges would come around to 80K while my flight booking price was 62K; meaning I would get no refund.
However, at 2:47PM, Emanuela pinged me on Slack and said they got news from the embassy saying my Visa was approved! Their lawyer directly called them embassy apparently. Seemed like they wanted to give me my Visa anyway, but just wanted to have some fun with me, which they had.
Checking the VFS status page, it didn’t show the courier tracking number. Called up the VFS and got the tracking number which said it was sent on 27th evening. Tried calling the tracking people on 29th morning to realize they were celebrating a Holiday and were not operational that day. Fingers crossed and waited without any updates. Upon checking the status on an instinct at 5:45PM, it showed the parcel had arrived at Calicut! (About a 100 miles away from where I live). Called up the delivery center, who said they won’t deliver it today since it is too late. Asked if my cousin could collect it on my behalf since he was about to return home from work. They first insisted on a signed approval letter from me which I pleaded and told them was in no way possible since I was a 100 miles away. Finally they agreed to it. Cousin got it and I got my passport with the Visa on 29th night.
By the way, it was a state wide strike on 31st of March in Kerala and my flight was on 31st evening. Our driver, my Dad and I were like:
Arriving at Florence and DjangoGirls
I had an uneventful flight COK ✈️MUC✈️FLR. I had made it a point to never take check-in language whenever I fly. I stuck to that and traveled with 1 laptop bag containing all my clothes plus one backpack with my laptop. Heh. However, it was on the way that I realized Florence didn’t have Uber. For a person who bought a smart phone *only* to use Uber, that was quite catastrophic.
The main low point of my entire stay (and I am sure most of you are going to kill me for this) was the hunt to get food that I liked to eat on a daily basis. It didn’t help at all that I was quite conservative about it as well. So my daily routine was something like:
Breakfast: 7 bread slices with scrambled eggs from Hotel Delle Nazioni.
Lunch: 2 Filet-o-Fish McDonald’s burger.
Dinner: Chicken Biriyani from Zafferano.
The day I reached was slightly tougher since the airbnb that I booked was at Novoli. It was about 3kms away from the city center and didn’t have too many options around.
On April the 2nd, I woke up quite early in the hopes of finding one of the McDonald’s nearby open. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. My host had told me to about this call-and-go radio taxi thing. I called the number and the person said quite a lot of Italian that I could not understand. Once I heard “address”, I told him the google maps location that I had jotted down.
I got the Taxi, showed the driver my intended destination and he got me to the DjangoGirls venue. I was slightly early and extremely hungry. I was hoping the others at the venue would know the places around where I could catch a bite from. However, either they didn’t understand my seriousness or they were completely bogged down with the organizing activities. Suffice to say, I had to walk out on a whim hunting for some place to eat something.
It was a Sunday morning and at 8.30AM, all the places on the map were closed except for a biker hangout. I was again afraid of embarrassing myself and hoped I would find at least one other place to eat. Long story short, I didn’t, and ended up walking into this biker hangout and asking “Anything ve-ge-ta-rian?”.
The salesman didn’t understand it at first, but when I slowly repeated “vegetarian”, he asked me, “vegetarian sandwich?” in a strong Italian accent. I happily nodded and waited for the promised food. I felt so helpless and lonely at that point.
He brought me a cold, thick & hard bread sliced in the middle, stuffed with cold cabbage and some other vegetable. Cold. Hard. I missed home, so much. I somehow ate it since staying hungry while having to teach was not an option.
The DjangoGirls event itself was, however, quite a memorable experience. It started on a low since all three girls assigned to me had to withdraw at the last moment. Even before I realized that had happened, one girl simply walked in to the event. Kathy Zhou from China. She was assigned to me. So were two other random attendees – Vera from Russia and Madsie from Canada. We were set.
All three were extremely new to programming, except for Vera who had some shell scripting background. It was so gratifying seeing their excitement and enthusiasm making the Python shell print lists and dictionaries. Those few special moments make teaching worth it.
Kathy and Madsie jelled well together since both of them were completely beginners and were working their way through the tutorial together. Vera, however, was captivated by python lists. Her interest and curiosity led me to explain list slicing in detail, each operation sending her into a fit of joy. It was a real pleasure seeing her picking it up and trying random things by herself.
Madsie with her quick wit and humor kept the morale and mood of the team at a high. At certain moments we laughed so hard that we got tears in our eyes. It was fun, all the while, making progress through the tutorial. They couldn’t complete the entire tutorial, but I am sure all of them got a good head start into trying things out. And I am intentionally leaving out what happened after I showed them how to use inspect element to view and change stuff around on the browser. Let’s just say that my Twitter account was the guinea pig.
It was at the event that I met Laura, Ambra & Emanuela – all of whom I had interacted with during my Visa process. Ending the day, we took quite a few pictures and finally Ambra booked a cab for me to get to my hotel.
Checking into Hotel Delle Nazioni, the staff told me my “roommate” was already in my room 304. I went and knocked, not really knowing what to expect and wondering how to greet and…
The door opened. I saw him and I exclaimed, “Hamub!”.
“Humphrey”, he corrected me politely.
“Yes yes. Wow! What a coincidence! Did they intentionally put us in together? Wow, this is such a pleasant surprise”, I was full of excitement and childish joy.
DjangoCon Europe – The Conference and sprints
The concept of food scared me for some reason. I was so worried that I would embarrass myself in front of others due to my eating style that I finally did it during the Speaker’s dinner. Later on that.
I was quite relieved to find Bread and scrambled eggs for breakfast at the hotel though.
“Ah! At least something I used to eat back at home. Thank God I won’t have to stay hungry until Lunch”, I thought to myself. I used to stuff myself with 8 or 9 bread slices and scrambled eggs everyday morning. After all, you should eat like a King for your breakfast, correct?
Having been at the forefront of getting about a 1000 people registered for PyCon India within 45 minutes, I waltzed my way towards the venue enjoying the lovely weather and the already bustling city center.
I was greeted by that queue at the front of the venue. However, that was a blessing in disguise as I met Mujavvid and Imdad while I was waiting in the queue. Queuing friends, I suppose. Both of them were from London. Although I’ve always found it harder to understand British English than both American and Australian, I enjoy listening to British English more than the others. Suffice to say I had a lovely chat with these two Gentlemen.
I am not the one who usually attends all the talks at any conference. If the topic feels like something that I would want to discuss with the speaker about afterwards, then I pay attention to the talk. Otherwise I usually depend on the recordings and spend my time at the conference hanging out in the open spaces and having as much conversation as I can.
That didn’t quite work out this time since “open spaces” were very limited. A pet peeve probably, but that’s the only thing I found as a downside to my entire experience. I made up for it by picking random folks to sit beside during each talk. Worked quite well, I say.
Conversations mostly revolved around the technology scene in their respective countries. Economy, life, work-life balance and their day to day job.
The conversations:
It was super exciting to catch up with Flavio and Lais. Filipe from Vinta Software had introduced me to both of them a month before the trip. (A special thanks to Vinta and these folks for cdrf.co). We ran into each other more than a couple of times, each time drawing a new tangent to the existing conversation, exploring Brazil’s history, the naming rules (ha, junior!), the portugese and of course, Django.
The Dubliners (whose names I just can’t seem to recollect) were a jolly bunch. Interestingly enough, they’re the only ones ever whom I didn’t feel dumb asking the question “Hey, I met this other person from Dublin. Do you by any chance know them?”. Usually that’s a dumb question, but these three Gentlemen reassured me that the chances of Dubliners knowing each other were quite high. I’ve never made a secret of the fact that given a choice, Ireland would be the country where I would love to go and settle in. Someday, someday…
I ran into Kyriakos from Cyprus.
A 'psycho' path. 