Why writing a blogpost after long time?
It’s been a long time since I published a blog post. It’s been almost a year since I posted my Sarvam joining blog post.
I thought I’d write a post about the Pune FOSS 3.0 Conference. One of the panelists, Mukta Aphale, mentioned that having a blog is a great way to stand out. For me, it’s also a way to check off one of my goals this year: to travel to a few cities in India. So far this year, I’ve traveled to Mysore, Kozhikode, Ooty, Chennai, and now Pune.
My Experience at Pune FOSS 3.0
The idea to attend this conference came from a conversation with Rahul, CEO of FOSS United, who suggested that if I wanted to visit more cities, I should check out FOSS United events. He mentioned there would be several events this summer, and I saw that both PuneFOSS and MumbaiFOSS are happening in April 2025.
I arrived at the event a bit late—around 12 PM—but was greeted by the familiar face of Vishal Arya, Program Director at FOSS United. We chatted for a while. The first session I attended was by Aayushi and Aarathy from Red Hat, who spoke about web accessibility. It was an informative session titled The A11y Revolution: How Small Changes Lead to Big Impact.
During lunch, I spoke with a few people who asked about Sarvam and had some questions on AI/ML. I also caught up with Nemo, whom I met earlier at FOSSMEET 2024. I’m a big fan of his work. He’s now on the governing board of FOSS United. We discussed the work I’m doing at Sarvam, some improvements we could make, and his open-source projects like endoflife.date and blr.today. Turns out we now live quite close to each other. It’s always great to meet someone like Nemo, who has deep experience and long-standing involvement in the FOSS community. I’m excited to see what he’ll bring to FOSS United this year.
We had a nice lunch, with some small papads, roti, fruits, two variety of curries, butter milk etc. It’s impressive how well FOSS United, a non-profit, organized such a quality event. This was followed by two panel discussions on Beyond the Buzzwords and Figuring Out Career Growth: Challenges, Choices & FOSS.
The panel featured Vipul A M, Mukta Aphale, and Aditya Godbole, moderated by Chinmay Naik. There was discussion around AI tools, past tech trends like blockchain and cloud, and how they panned out.
A big takeaway was that to succeed in your career, you must be so good they can’t ignore you. If you can explain what you do to your grandparents, you’ve truly mastered it. Blogging was highly encouraged by both Mukta and Aditya.
They also shared what they look for in candidates. Mukta checks blogs and GitHub profiles. Aditya said he doesn’t care about GitHub at all—he looks for the “kida” (curiosity/drive). He values depth and whether the person enjoys the journey. Skills like communication and coding still matter, of course.
Vipul emphasized that communication is essential, especially in consulting. 90% of your effectiveness depends on it. Even 15–20% of his day sometimes goes into correcting grammatical errors in client communication. Writing clean code is one thing; articulating your work is another essential skill.
Empathy also came up—both in product development (understanding users) and within teams (being kind and empathetic). In another panel, people discussed how contributing to FOSS projects might not directly help land a job, but it demonstrates passion, which definitely matters
One standout talk was Why I Didn’t Sell endoflife.date by Nemo. So a bit about endoflife.date website, which is an informational website about 400+ products which gives concise information about open-source and closed-source projects which are popular like Kubernetees, Apple watch, iphones etc. This website has per month about 9 million impression, 200K clicks and consumes almost 1TB bandwidth. He shared how it was manually done for like 1 year, but then he started automating project so release fixes are automatically mentioned in the project. So that he needn’t always manually check for things in upstream website. Few folks, came to buy this website. But he didn’t sell as he never trusted them to be someone like him who cares deeply about the project.
Also he talked about how you should have proper guiding principles, contributor guidelines for open-source project. He also talked about what folks should do to build great open-source project.
The session wrapped up with the organizers thanking everyone. It was great meeting people, exploring a new city, and attending such an engaging event.
🔑 Key Takeaways from PuneFOSS 3.0
- Blogging matters: Several panelists emphasized writing as a way to stand out and reflect on your journey.
- Career growth ≠ hype chasing: Don’t blindly follow buzzwords. Be really good at your core work and know how to explain it simply.
- FOSS ≠ job guarantee, but shows passion: Contributions might not land you a job directly but reflect depth, consistency, and interest.
- Communication is everything: Whether you’re writing code, consulting, or leading—being able to explain clearly is a huge differentiator.
- Empathy wins: With teammates, with users, and with contributors in the open-source world.
- Have principles: For open-source maintainers, guiding principles and contributor guidelines are crucial. Nemo’s refusal to sell endoflife.date shows how important intent and vision are for project sustainability.
Until, next time. See you very soon.
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