KGP Developer’s Meet
On 18th March 2018, KGP witnessed its first ever developers meet[1]. The initiative was taken up by Ksheera Sagar the UG Representative to the Senate. He got to know about the MetaKGP hack day[2], and he thought of a bigger version of it to bring all the developers in the campus on a single platform and also welcome students who are interested in becoming developers.
Following were the goals he thought of :
Metakgp[3], Lean In[4], Kharagpur Open Source Society[5], Institute Wellness Group[6] came together to make the event a success.
The event started with Naresh and Nishant giving an introduction of MetaKGP and its various projects. After that Kshitij gave a presentation about the initiatives of KOSS to promote the opensource culture in the campus.Siddharth took the opportunity to bring to the notice of the administration on how providing some open endpoints to the data in ERP can help developer community build cool projects around the ERP and benefits of enabling an OAuth 2.0 authentication for the ERP to make it more developer friendly.
One of the most frustrating and time-consuming thing for all the final and pre-final year students in building their CV on ERP. Ksheera Sagar pointed out the problems in the CV module and proposed a solution for the same.We all know how bad the gender ratio is in IITs and it is worst in the tech community of the IITs, Ayushi Mrigen gave an introduction about Lean In and also an insight of the perspective of girls community on why they think this problem exists and what are their steps to improve this situation.
Prof Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya, Prof Pallab Dasgupta, Prof Adrijit Goswami shared their views on the open source movement currently prevailing in the campus and about the steps already taken by the administration and their plans of the future to help the developer community.
Prof Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya, Deputy Director, IIT Kharagpur briefed the students about the opportunities for the funding of projects and lab spaces from the administration side.
Professor PDG of Computer Science and Technology Department, an alumnus of the batch of ’90, shared the story from his college time. Since we all know, it was the time of genesis of open source. He shared how they were just shifting to UNIX systems and how Donald Knuth developed Tex and open sourced it, but due to complications, no one was able to use it and later came Latex a more user-friendly version of Tex which was again open sourced. His talk was very insightful and inspired a lot of people sitting there.
Prof Adrijit Goswami, ERP Chairman, talked about how the ERP functioning is different in Kharagpur than other IITs and the autonomous structure of ERP in our institute. He also told about the current problems faced in ERP and how students can help in overcoming them. Though, he didn’t talk much related to the presentation given by Siddharth on OAuth for ERP which was quite disheartening.
Thanks to Himanshu, the whole event was video recorded, and the video for the same can be found here.
All the presentations from the event can be found here.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/events/181539055903174/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/metakgp/posts/1714405645479506
[3] https://www.facebook.com/metakgp/
[4] https://www.facebook.com/leaniniitkgp/