Malaysia Open Source Conference (MOSCMY) and JomLaunch

Last week I've attended one of the biggest open source event in Malaysia and another co-located event that is JomLaunch by prominent local developer community called JomWeb.

The first slot I managed to join (I skipped the first day) is called Pentaksiran Pengaturcaraan Komputer Berdasarkan Domain-domain Pembelajaran (Programming Assesment based on Learning Domains) by Ms. Noraini Talib, IT Executive at UKM. How to teach programming is always my topic of interest and it good to see it from an academic perspective.

The next talk about usage of Open Broadcaster Software (OBS)  for classroom teaching also interesting. I'd never heard the software before and I can forsee some good use of it.

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I have my own slot too, which aim to encourage and kickstart people to become OSS project contributor on Github. It supposed to be a workshop so my initial plan is to have everyone do a hands on practice but it turned out nobody brought a laptop so I have to make good use of the 2 hours slot by talking about contributing to open source project. I'd failed to fully utilize the 2 hours but we have a good discussion with the participants. A lecturer came up to me at the end of the session saying she plan to start introducing git/github into her students project going forward.

Another slot by Abyres (one of the sponsor) also an eye opening. I learned about Data Raya Sektor Awam DRSA which is a big data initiative by government to provide executive framework on how big data project can be implemented in the government agency. It surprise me that they are doing Patriotisme Analysis as part of the sentiment analysis project under Kementerian Komunikasi dan Multimedia Malaysia. They also revealed their open source project called PySiphae which interestingly being developed in Python. They use postgresql a lot and to the question whether postgres still relevant in post-hadoop world, their answer is YES, though they advice to target it for reporting, data warehouse, data mart vs operational db that is currently on proprietary, which in their own word provide better risk vs reward.

The real kicker in this conference to me is the slot by Adzmely Mansor from Nexoprima. All this while, I've only known him through online channel so it's good to see him in person. Very soft spoken but fully energetic guy, especially when talking about highly technical topics. His slot was on Vertical Performance Tuning of a linux system. It's a topic rarely covered compared to horizontal scaling. The slot deep dived into the linux system, starting from the basic stuff of understanding what is system load and OS thread to kernel hacking on TCP TIME_WAIT to improve network performance. The core theme of the talk is that little attention is giving to vertical tuning that usually lead to underused of system resources. This definitely require a dedicated blog post to cover all the details ;)

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Jenkins is nothing new to us (and it's a long overdue task for us to incorporate Jenkins or some other CI tools into our workflow) but what make the talk interesting was that it come from a group of student from UiTM Shah Alam. We may commonly heard how student are lacking off adequate knowledge about what industry need for real job but these students definitely different, thanks to their charismatic lecturer who personally set up the group to provide a platform for the students to explore relevant tech stuff outside of their academic studies. I have a short chat with the lecturer and it gave me some ideas how we can set up similar group here.

Following up after the closing of MOSCMY is JomLaunch on the next day, an event by different organizer but sharing the same venue. It's a platform for startup, individual or team to showcase their latest project or product. Everyone got 10 minutes stage time and 16 projects/products have been showcased these time.

Stampede's blog has already covered the event in detail so I don't plan to repeat it here. Head over to their cool blog !

Night mamak session with SumberManusia.my team (they also present on JomLaunch). Photo credit to Nasrul Hazim.

Overall, the whole event was very exciting as I managed to meet old and new friends, some of which all these while we met only in the online world. Btw, if you missed this event, kindly note that we have another PyconMy conference coming up in August. Make sure to grab the ticket while it still available. See you there !