Please give a brief introduction of yourself.

I’m currently a Senior Engineer with Red Hat. Prior to that was an Independent Consultant, consulting in Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Indic Text processing. I’m a Free Software, Agile, extreme programming evangelist and am involved with the IndLinux project (http://www.indlinux.org) . My interests lie in Open Source Scripting languages, I18N and l10N of software applications. Web Application development, Functional Programming and Databases.


What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

Mostly the Low hanging fruit ones :P . I have a few projects at http://sourceforge.net/users/ramkrsna/ . Now a days I maintain a few python modules for the fedora project, you can get them here http://ramkrsna.fedorapeople.org/fedora/ . I’m also the primary maintainer for the Hunspell Kannada dictionary.


What will your workshop be, exactly ?

The age old problem of Problem Solving.


What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this workshop? What do you expect ?

It will give an overview to the participants about different kinds of possibilities to store data . It would also try to address different pros and cons of data storage. Types of Optimization strategies and Algorithms to be used while facing different types of data. Python would be used as powerful tool to demonstrate the above.


What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people working on their first contribution to any FOSS project ?

Grok the Source, read as much code as possible. Do not be afraid to
fork a project. Seek active contributors, share the success and responsibilities. Pick a religion and worship it, Use Emacs. Religion in this case is the Church of Emacs.


Why did you chose python over other programming languages ?

Its was the next best thing after Slice Bread :-) . The language is simple yet so powerful. It caters for all kinds of audience. I.e If you have been used scripting before, you can program in python without any knowledge of Object Oriented Programming. Personally, coming for working in computational linguistics and functional programming background. I found Python to be closer among its modern peers, python is truly “A Poor Man’s LISP “. Though PERL was a choice, but when it comes to readability I find GPG signatures more readable than PERL code.


How do you use python in your day-to-day activities. ?

Luckily for me. My employer Red Hat swears by Python. Python is used
for both fun and profit.


What advice will you give to programmers moving from other languages to python ?

Moving from one programming language to another is more of a personal choice. Knowing programming methodologies is more important than the language itself. If you are racing against time, trying to pick up a new language python has an advantage with a leaner learning curve and cleaner syntax. Also for developers , who would love rapid prototyping. The language comes with all batteries included. Also has power third party tools, Scipy, NumPy, Twisted.


Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?

This is going to be my 4th GNUnify. Its amazing that the college students and staff along with the PLUG members pull off a professionally run conference year after year. Love the energy levels of the conference.