My experience at MiniDebConf IIT Kanpur 2026

Introduction

MiniDebConf is smaller version of Main Yearly Deb Conf. MiniDebConf takes place regionally in different part of the world. People can organise it and spirit the spirit of community. This is very good for people to start with FOSS, open source and community building exercise.

These kind of small conferences/meetups also helps people meet people with different sets of skills. And understand variety of tech topics.

About the conference

I applied for a talk on topic All you need for writing: An Introduction to Ghost CMS. Luckily, it was accepted, and I got a chance to speak 2nd time during a DebConf. Initially, it was during the main DebConf23 at Kochi. And now here in MiniDebConf Kanpur.

First, we were told that we would be getting accommodation in the IIT Kanpur guest house. But due to some issues at the last moment, we were provided accomodation outside the IIT Kanpur that was in a hotel.

The very first day I met some new faces, I asked a person who was sharing room with me at what place do you work? He replied saying that he is a student studying in the 11th class. I was amazed to hear that during our time, there was no such awareness about FOSS communities. This was quite surprising.

So my talk was scheduled on the very first day. We got ready around 11 am, and I booked the auto. If you are going to IIT Kanpur you need to go through a railway track that looks good, the train is just passing through about 200 meters from gate of IIT Kanpur.

And whenever a person need to enter to IIT Kanpur they need to go through set of checks and verification. Because it consists some NCC and army based offices. So you need to get a pass everytime you enter and submit during the exit.

We got our pass within minutes, well, some people faced issues due to long queues.

We entered the campus and my roomate asked casually what do you think the area will be of this campus I said no idea. And it was around 1000 acres. I was like it means so much of walking and travelling within the campus.

Then, while walking inside the campus, we were walking on cyncle track that we confused with a pathway. Then we saw ohh does cycle tracks also exists. Then we moved away and started walking on the pathway.

We figure out the place we need to go and met all the people around there.

And the conference was delayed by almost 2 hours because we were not able to get the key and setup the stuff.

So we waited outside with hopes in our eyes.. to get our conference started soon.

And the conference started, we had good talks by many people.

Talk by Lothar that was the keynotes on LibreOffice explaining about how it helps.

One of the talk by subin where he has visualized the data of naming pattern in kerala. How people's names were named throughout the different years and what name exactly was on trend in which year.

And then we headed for lunch, where we found out that the first canteen is about to close, so it can only accommodate 5 people.

After accommodating 5 people, we went to a different canteen where the electricity went out, and they couldn't cook at that time. So, having no breakfast me and my roomate was dreaming of food. Then another student told that there is another canteen that is around 300 meters from the current place. But believe me, it was not 300 meters, it was around 1.5-2 km. So we around 12-13 people walked till that canteen, hoping that we would get our dream food.

We entered and waited for our food, which took around 20 minutes to prepare. Meanwhile, we got lassi and buttermilk.

During the lunch time we saw some weird thing that battery wasn't charged. Due to no electricity, the canteen cannot cook. Like don't know what was happening at place like IIT.

And then we headed back for the talks because we were again late by 1 hour due to this canteen issue.

So just after lunch, Anupa had a talk on Debian release life cycle

And then my talk goes where I explained how easy it is to write blogs on ghost. And how people can start writing in no time with self hosting aspect of it.

People found it useful. And asked a few questions after the talk.

Just after my talk, Ravi also put Kaju Katli on the table where mentioning Kaju Katli by Ravi

This was an amazing experience to meet people from different sets of skills, and they have shared their thoughts on different topics, like a very exciting talk by Moksh(Untrusem) on Permacomputing: A Humane Computing Paradigm, and another good talk by disaster2life on Decentralising Indian Communication. And a whirlwind tour of OpenStreetMap by contrapunctus.

People during the evening went out to see the Supercomputer at IIT Kanpur and it's computing infrastructre.

I was so tried so booked an auto and came back to my hotel.

Next, after sleeping for 3 hours we went outside to eat something.

Where pav bhaaji was amazing, and bread pizza was also good. Another good thing was tea and coffee. And the worst ever in your life thing you can try is - Any drinks other than water.

The next day in the morning, the security took much time compared to the first day. We went inside the campus and met few of people from the conference. We went together for the breakfast. Where I saw very weird kind of sitting area that can definitely harm anyone.

These chairs you need to flip in order to sit. And these are very risky because of uneven space around these.

We ordered our food and moved to the talk sessions.

And before then, we saw a bunch of goodies placed at the table

Then I saw some good merch, a 3d printed VLC logo it was looking stunning -

And finally, we headed for the second day of lunch and this day nothing gone wrong.

The food was good with plenty of options and tasty at the same time.

Then, just after lunch, disaster2life gave a talk on how people can make decentralised communication and a short guide on electronic components and use cases. This was an amazing talk.

Then I needed to board the train, so I asked people for a group photo.

And that's all from this minidebconf. It was all fun and exciting.

I hope you like the blog. Let me know your views.