Before I knew it, I found myself already at the second day of the FOSSAsia 2026 conference on 10th March 2026 after a rather eventful previous day. While I did plan to wake up a little later, I realized that I had to prepare for my presentation on the Fedora Badges Revamp Project that was scheduled later that day. This was the only proposal that got selected, and the other one on the Fedora Forgejo Migration Project did not make it, so I had to ensure that I was well prepared for this. After some rounds of talk rehearsals and some quick bites of breakfast, Samyak Jain and I exited Lumen Bangkok Udomsuk Hotel to be greeted by comparatively cooler weather on that day. Since it was more of the same choices on the breakfast menu, we were able to leave the hotel as early as 0945am Indochina Time. Climbing the long escalator to finally make it to the FOSSAsia 2026 event venue, we noticed just how much the community booth layouts had changed that day. For instance, the GNOME Foundation community booth was now positioned beside those of the Debian Project and the TeaLinuxOS Project.

I had a mixed feeling about this, while this did allow for the corridor to be widened, the space for volunteer staffing at the community booths of the GNOME Foundation, Debian Project, and TeaLinuxOS Project was severely restricted. This meant that it was quite a struggle for folks who had to move away from or into the booth locations, as that required the folks around them to be moved as well. Just like the day before, we decided to assist Aaditya Singh with booth operations, all while trying to finish off the last hundred Fedora Project stickers that we had saved up from our participation at DevConf.IN 2026. While we had previously signed up for the ExpressVPN-sponsored FOSSAsia hackathon on Internet Security Development Using Artificial Intelligence, we ultimately decided to give away our designated slot to other younger participants who could not register in time. We discussed just how important this hackathon participation was for budding folks who were getting started with free and open source software, but not so much for us, since we have been around the scene for a long while now.

This opened us up further for many impromptu conversations, ideation discussions, booth visits, and of course, scheduled presentations. After leaving Samyak at the hallway track, I headed into a newer arrangement of community booths in the second corridor. Since my work laptop had malfunctioning cooling, which made screeching loud noises, I had to use his laptop to deliver my presentation later that day. Not only did I ensure that I downloaded my slide deck and speaker notes onto his computing device well in advance, but I also took care to avoid display inactivity suspensions and ensure an ample laptop battery charge. After a quick round through the community booths, I headed into the hall where the ExpressVPN-sponsored FOSSAsia hackathon was taking place, purely out of curiosity. Informing one of the co-located volunteers about my involvement as a visitor and not as a participant, they allowed me into the room to chat with the fellow participants. Since the hackathon was duration gated, I took extra care to curb my nosiness and allow the teams to work their magic.

Out of all the participating groups that I interacted with in the competition hall, my conversations with the likes of Saksham Sirohi and Arnav Angarkar about their ideas stayed with me. They knew how they had to limit their actual implementation and were focused on delivering an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that could be expanded upon. I also took some time to have a quick conversation with ExpressVPN employees who were serving as competition moderators there to understand what they look for in a certain implementation. Getting myself a cup of boba tea (and skipping it because I did not like it), I met up with the likes of Ajinkya R. and Dakshita Thakkar at the hallway track. On returning to the collective, I decided to lend my assistance to Pongsakorn S. at the KDE e.V. community booth as well, besides helping Aaditya at the GNOME Foundation community booth. I learned that he was using OpenSUSE Leap on his personal laptop and was interested in RPM packaging, while I was placing some of the last fifty Fedora Project stickers on the booth table.

In contrast to the unoccupied booths from yesterday, it was endearing to see how the likes of Aaditya and Pongsakorn stood their ground at their respective booths, even when the footfall on the second day was noticeably smaller than the day before. Amidst our conversations, I connected them with each other, and Aaditya even took the chance to showcase the GNOME Foundation community quiz application that he had been working on. Following the community quiz activity idea from the Fedora Project Community Presence at DevConf.IN 2026, he wanted to use the remaining GNOME-styled tee-shirts as prizes for folks who attempted the quiz and got all the answers right at the hardest difficulty. Needless to state explicitly, I gave the quiz a try, not because I wanted another tee, but because I wanted to appreciate what he had been working on. A part of me also wanted to take on this hardest-difficulty question challenge to understand how much I knew about the GNOME Foundation and to see if I could learn things I did not know about the community and its activities in the process.

While I got most questions correct on the first attempt, it took me three attempts to get the satisfaction of having all the answers right. Departing from the booth and weaving through a thin collection of mostly booth attendants, event volunteers, and talk presenters, I made it to Mitchell Yue's talk on the Lynx Framework and how it could be used to move from web development to native applications at around 1000am Indochina Time. I was intrigued to learn about this development library, which made use of native bindings for impressive performance. I was even more taken aback (but positively) when I was gifted a ByteDance tee-shirt for asking how it differed from the usual QtWebEngine bindings, as I was well-versed in Qt. This act of brand advocacy definitely seemed to have encouraged the audience to share more feedback or ask more questions during the talk. Heading back to the Debian Project community booth, I shared my experiences from my splurge at Animate Store from the previous day with Ananthu CV before helping Abhijit PA get some cold coffee from the reception desk.

We were also joined by Shreenivas at the GNOME Foundation community booth, which allowed us to pace ourselves while tending to questions and feedback from booth visitors. During a brief visit from Daniel J Blueman, he connected with Aaditya to understand where he could report bugs and improvements for the GNOME desktop. He seemed to have been plagued by problems with the use of external monitors on his ARM-based (Advanced RISC Machines) SoC-powered (System on Chips) laptop on his fresh Debian Linux installation. Meanwhile, I wasted no time unofficially promoting my presentation on the Fedora Badges Revamp Project to the enthusiastic folks from the day before who visited our booth. Meanwhile, I also gave a quick demonstration on how RPM packaging works to a relentlessly curious Pongsakorn, who wanted to package their Rust application for Fedora Linux. Using one of my own hobby projects, Loadouts for Genshin Impact, I showed him how to write an RPM specfile and how programming-language-specific macros could help make things easier.

As I was not sure if something like the PyProject RPM Macros for Rust existed, I wanted our conversation to be an entry point for them into the RPM packaging tooling ecosystem. While answering his question about Linux kernel package versioning on Fedora Rawhide, I also fielded a question about conflicting packages from Abhijit. Since he was experienced with how the Debian Linux packaging process would handle this, he was curious to know how RPM package management tools would address the situation. Using various examples of how software packages are related to one another, I explained how this linking not only mapped dependencies but conflicts as well. At around 1230pm Indochina Time, I wrapped up my lunch and connected with Simon Strohmenger, who was visiting the community booth then. He shared how he worked on funding free and open source software events across Europe and supporting critical engineering ecosystem resources and was also curious to know more about what I had to share regarding the AI-assisted Contribution Policy from the Fedora Project.

After sharing contact details with each other, he also checked in with me on whether I would be willing to present a proposal on best practices in contributor onboarding and retention in free and open source software communities. In our conversations, we realized just how crucial it had become to discuss governance policies among grassroots collaborators to ensure that their implementation does not come off as a negative surprise. I also shared my approaches to using LLM (Large Language Model) tooling to assist project maintainers and budding contributors by automatically addressing various low-hanging fruits. Empathizing with how stressful and overwhelming it ends up being for the maintainers and newcomers, respectively, AI tooling could be utilized for these positive purposes instead of worrying about its popularized contemporary taboo perspective. While I could not get him to participate in my Fedora Badges Revamp Project talk later that day, he said that he would send over some of his engineering friends, as he found the general idea of awarding contributions fascinating.

Since there were not a lot of folks present at the event apart from those who had some activity to participate in, Aaditya struggled to distribute the remaining GNOME-styled tee-shirts. On the other hand, we had been extremely successful in distributing the stickers, so we were able to advocate for our projects from the community booth. At around 0130pm Indochina Time, I checked in with the event volunteers about the allegedly malfunctioning livestreaming functionality in one of the presentation halls. Amidst my attempts to have that fixed before my talk began in about three hours, I briefly met up with Saksham again in the hallway, who mentioned his plans to expand the hackathon project, and I shared the idea of "releasing (software) fast and releasing often." It was an absorbing sight to see how the participants at the ExpressVPN-sponsored FOSSAsia Hackathon were helping each other with a gargantuan variety of problem statements. Such a sight (and evidence of friendly competition) is something one would rarely get to see outside of free and open-source software communities.

I was thankfully able to get myself caffeinated at around 0330pm Indochina Time, as with the activities moving slowly throughout that that day, I found myself zoning out every now and then. After addressing the livestreaming issue, I met up with some folks from AWS (Amazon Web Services) who were visiting our trinity community booth lineup and had previously worked with the likes of David Duncan and Rich Bowen. Since they had experience with Amazon Linux, they reflected on how Fedora Linux provided them with an innovation-driven upstream distribution to build upon. After that one last conversation with them, Aaditya decided to start packing up the booth at around 0430pm Indochina Time, while I kept myself busy helping him with the tooling. With the time being barely fifteen minutes away from my presentation's commencement, Samyak returned to the GNOME Foundation community booth. Pongsakorn also found his companion back when Tomas returned to the KDE e.V. community booth, and I was ready for my talk to be delivered at the tail end of the event.

As the presentation designated training room had my slide deck already fetched, I did not have to bother with sharing my screen. There were some technical issues with the clicker device, though, as it failed to switch slides when the window was in fullscreen mode. I decided not to settle for windowed mode to save time, while Norbert Preining introduced me in the speaker area at around 0445pm Indochina Time. For a presentation scheduled at the tail end of the conference, it was reassuring to see that I still had around twenty attendees in the hall who were curious to know what I had to offer. Being the deciding moment that I had been practicing regularly for, I wanted to ensure that I was doing justice to their time (and attention) and that of the remote attendees. Thanks to Samyak's laptop and the regular touchups, the fifteen-minute-long presentation went largely well, and I also addressed some feedback and questions from both the in-person attendees and the hall host, Norbert. After finishing my talk, we headed into the competition hall where the four judges had assembled, by then.

After briefly waiting for the participating teams to propose their project ideas and for the judges to complete their evaluations, our collective made our way into the main hall to witness the winner announcements at around 0530pm Indochina Time. As the winners were announced and the event concluded, Samyak and I deliberated on our evening plans, as we did not intend to continue our stay with the FOSSAsia 2026 attendees at the Night Market. After his proposal was turned down by the folks he was planning to invite, we formed a group of four, including him, Soundarya Rangarajan, Aaditya, and myself, to visit Bangkok Chinatown. This idea felt strategically sound as it had become a little too late to visit the riverside for a calming evening boat ride dinner, and coincidentally, Soundarya was staying at the same hotel as Samyak and me. After making a quick drop of Aaditya's belongings at my hotel room and taking some time to re-energize ourselves after the long second day, we started looking for cabs using the Grab application at around 0700pm Indochina Time.

Amidst the heavy Bangkok evening traffic, we struggled to get a ride until we finally secured one after about thirty minutes of waiting through the Bolt service. I was not a fan of the service, as the toll expenses were not accounted for in the final billing, thus resulting in us having to pay for them separately. What I was a fan of, though, was the taxi driver assigned to us, as the cheerful person did not let the piling traffic and the linguistic barrier prevent him from having a friendly chat with us. With the use of Google Translate, he graciously helped us plan our course and described what we could expect in Bangkok Chinatown. And he could not have been more right - because when we got off the Bolt ride, the view of the neon filled, slightly humid hustle and bustle of Chinatown was a scene that nothing could even compare to. Weaving through the visitor crowd at the periphery, our first stop was, of course, a stall selling the world-famous Mango Sticky Rice for just 100 Thai Baht per plate. We finally got to experience firsthand just how true the people were who sang nothing but praises of this exclusive snack!

We dove deeper into our little roadside dining adventure with some Coconut Egg Sweet Crepes and Japanese Fried Octopus Balls before deciding to split into groups of two, as it did not sit right by Aaditya and myself, since the cuisines there were mostly non-vegetarian. As Samyak and Soundarya headed their way at around 0830pm Indochina Time, him and I decided to get even more creative by digging into some Shrimp Meat Dimsum Dumplings and Fried Crab Meat Rolls. After finishing off with some Fried Sweet Maple Fish and Ripe Alphonso Mango Slices, all for amazing bargains, we navigated the confusing pathways to reach Jam Jam Eatery Chinatown. As Aaditya's belongings were in my room, we left for the hotel at around 0915pm Indochina Time without waiting much longer. It was not that I had my fill of exploration, but I felt responsible to ensure he made it back safely at BTS Punnawithi to his hotel room. After hanging out in my hotel room and discussing industrial mentorship ideas, I decided to see him off and call it a day at around 1200am Indochina Time.

After kicking off the FOSSAsia 2026 proceedings with the "choose-your-adventure-flavoured" Community Day, the first day on 09th March 2026 began for me at around 0730am Indochina Time. It took me quite a lot of strength to get myself moving out of bed, but I knew that I had to make it to the conference venue by 1000am Indochina Time to appear in the group photo. I rang up Samyak Jain and we planned to rendezvous downstairs at the hotel reception in about ninety minutes from then. While I had my talk on the Fedora Badges Revamp Project scheduled for the next day, I wanted to ensure that I was able to find some time to rehearse it at least twice per day leading up to the scheduled time. Fifteen minutes were not enough for the number of topics I wanted to cover as a part of my presentation, and as such I wanted to use it as an appetizer or an entry point for those interested to explore the project by themselves. I headed downstairs to get some breakfast bites after having connected with my friends and family from back home. The choices were more or less the same as yesterday, but this time around, I elected to stick with the greens as much as possible, just as Samyak did.

This change in my dietary preference gave me a first-person perspective on just how difficult it ends up being for someone who is vegetarian. While Samyak had his collection of "just-pour-warm-water" packaged food, I had to stick mostly with noodles and salad for the most part. When it came to the origin of the meat products, you would not want your guesses to go wrong, and the language barrier could pose a real problem for the specifics. After an okayish refueling, we stepped out of the hotel premises into a humid Thailand at around 0945pm Indochina Time and were able to reach True Digital Park West in about ten minutes from then. Thankfully, the venue was a whole lot more crowded than the previous day, with a variety of community booths either getting placed or attended by visitors. While this day (and the next day) were exclusive to ticketed personnel, the crowd was definitely a whole lot more than the free-of-charge Community Day (of the day before). I split from Samyak as he left with one of the FOSSAsia 2026 community volunteers to obtain his attendee badge. As I already had the speaker badge, I could dive in headfirst into all the booths and friends that we had on the ground there.

One of the first folks I met up with was, of course, Aaditya Singh from the GNOME Foundation, who was setting up the community booth by himself. With one more pair of hands, we made quick work of the booth setup as we placed both the Fedora Project stickers beside the GNOME Foundation stickers on display there for picking. Aaditya mentioned that he had been still rocking the Fedora Workstation installation that he had set up during the GNOME Asia 2024 event, where I gave away flash drives with distributions having the premier GNOME desktop environment. As he set up his exhibition laptop, he wanted to promote the vanilla GNOME desktop experience which, in his opinion, could not be done better than it was on Fedora Workstation. Funnily enough, we had the KDE e.V. community booth a corridor apart from the GNOME Foundation community booth. Trying not to read too much into the poetically inclined booth arrangements, I decided to visit them next once I was done setting up the operations with Aaditya. Amidst all the upcoming developments there, Tomas was pleased to share his work on the Konsole KDE terminal emulator with various advancements.

From live previews of image thumbnails and semantic colors to proactive sharing of directory layouts and drag-and-drop operations, Tomas' improvements felt really impactful in the quality-of-life areas for any general terminal emulator user. This put the Konsole KDE terminal emulator miles ahead of the container-first terminal emulator, Ptyxis, in my personal opinion. I did have questions about the security of this approach, as some files could be malicious in nature (especially SVG files when it came to image assets), but since Konsole relied on pre-generated thumbnails, this was not a problem. No files were executed in the attempt to make the proactive previews available to the users, and that gave me peace of mind to top off my already excited overall feeling about the feature improvements. After meeting up with Pongsakorn S., another KDE e.V. community member, and picking up some stylish badges, I left a portion of the Fedora Project stickers to be shared from their community booth as well. It was important to commemorate the fact that since the release of Fedora Linux 42, the KDE Plasma variant of Fedora Linux had stepped up to become an actual edition instead of just being a spin.

With Samyak returning to the GNOME Foundation community booth, Aaditya was no longer staffing by himself, so I went ahead to have a conversation with the folks at the Debian Project and the TeaLinuxOS Project community booths. It was interesting to note that they had their ground operations set up as early as 0830am Indochina Time. Chatting with the likes of Ananthu CV and Harry LBI from both the community booths respectively gave me distinctive perspectives on their projects and their involvements. While the stalwart Debian Project community has been around for a while, my interest was piqued to see just how TeaLinuxOS made the Arch Linux distribution usable by normal users with the use of the Calamares Installer and curated OOBE tooling. On being requested for advice from our steadfastly evolving Fedora Linux operating system, I emphasized just how important it is for the documentation to have clarity and to be accessible. A lot of contributors to a free and open source software project come from its pool of users, so it cannot be understated just how important it is to ensure that users are treated as first-class citizens and that their issue statements are taken seriously.

I departed further into the wider collective of community booths after having taken some pictures with these folks at their community booths. I was halted at the entrance by Wendy Ha, who was just arriving at the conference venue then and wanted me to meet a CNCF ambassador from Japan. Our (rather, short-lived) conversation was put to an end by Rajan Shah, who was seeking out folks from Red Hat and IBM Corp for a group photo. I pulled in Samyak, and with the likes of Shivraj Patil, Veerkumar Patil, Deepesh Nair, and Gaurav Kamathe from Red Hat and a bunch of others from IBM Corp, we had photographs both in front of the FOSSAsia conference venue entrance and in front of the long escalator. This is where I met Soumyadip Choudhury, another colleague from Red Hat, from my hometown, and we spent some time chatting before we headed into the large hall for the FOSSAsia community group photo. I was glad to note that, in an attempt to avoid large commotion, the participants could stay right where they were in their seats and the photo would be taken from the event stage, while only those who were at the extreme periphery were requested to make it to the middle part of the hall.

As most of our Red Hat collective was already together at the center, all we had to do was enjoy the event hosts' excellent oration while we put out our best poses for the cameraman. We also did not miss the opportunity to take some selfies by ourselves while we were at it, because the audience population was only going to get thinner from here on out for the day. Once we were through with those pictures, Samyak and I ran into the likes of Pritesh Kiri and Dakshita Thakkar, who happened to be attending the event for the first time just like us. Heading out to visit the community booths together, we began by interacting with folks working on ESP32x-powered 2D robotic drawing computers and 3D-printer-powered accessibility-focused appliance designs. Not only did we get to see the demonstration, but we also got to experience how a differently abled person could use a Sony DualShock 4 controller with just one hand and how a pencil-triggered nail cutter could prevent folks from getting hurt. This was followed by a visit to the VideoLAN Project community booth, consisting of what looked to me like mostly disinterested staff members tending to the booth visitors as and when they saw fit.

After helping ourselves to the postcard prints featuring the famous VideoLAN Project's parodies of famous movies, we moved over to the Matrix Project and database-related community booths. With their booth placements also made beside one another, it was interesting to know from them what they had to offer that their alternatives did not. Skipping through the dishearteningly unoccupied FLOSS Fund community booth, I met Samyak again at the Google Summer of Code community booth. It was great to catch up with Stephanie Taylor after having met her during FOSDEM 2025, and she also graciously provided us with some swag for having participated in the program as a mentee (for Samyak) and as a mentor (for myself). We returned to the GNOME Foundation community booth while being surrounded by an enthusiastic group of folks who were contributors to both the GNOME Foundation (through donations) and the Fedora Project (through contributions). Not only were they thrilled to find us there, but they also went a step ahead by proudly showing off their Fedora Linux installations (most prominently of which were Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite) from their laptops.

Stellar moments like these always end up re-energizing my resolve to support free and open source software in ways that I could. Getting to interact with folks like these who were just as resolute about the Fedora Project as I was made this trip already worthwhile, even though we had a couple of days ahead of us. They mentioned just how they regularly organized their local Fedora Linux installfest events to help with the adoption of our Fedora Project's primary offerings and also participated in the regularly organized testing events in our engineering community. While I could not provide them with the means to make donations as they wanted to contribute further, I requested them to propose their event through the officially ratified Fedora Mindshare event process. Being the model open source citizens that they were, I wanted to ensure that they did not have to spend out of their own pockets to organize Fedora Project events while ensuring that they were well equipped to host one in the already underrepresented APAC region. Increasing the Fedora Project's APAC representation was already at the top of my list, and this interaction only ended up centering my commitment towards this mission.

They magically had the intrinsic understanding of just how badly we need contributors to be onboarded and retained within the community to ensure the longevity of a project. A lot of times, it eventually ends up falling on the shoulders of a flywheel person when someone from the community has to depart for some reason. We did not even have to share what was upcoming in Fedora Linux, as they even had an alternate Fedora Rawhide installation handy for development purposes. As the event owner for the Fedora Project's community presence at FOSSAsia 2026, a part of me still felt bad to have missed out on having a dedicated separate community booth at the conference. Sure—we felt right at home with the folks from the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V., but we could very well have taken advantage of being the prominent RPM-based distribution there on site. A great deal of the community conversations would have then made their way directly to our community booth instead of us having to seek them out as event prospectors in all of our interactions. Instead of dwelling on this situation, I wanted to interact with the booth visitors from a Fedora Project governance member's perspective.

As I was both a part of the Fedora Mindshare and the Fedora Council governance bodies at the time, I used my event presence to hear more about potential opportunities as well as possible approaches towards community outreach from grassroots contributors. Depending on the matter at hand, I could either choose to address the same or pass it over to the teams responsible as a conduit. Finishing off with this heartfelt interaction, I headed over to the OpenKylin Project community booth to connect with the folks working on this downstream distribution of Debian Linux. Apart from its absolute resemblance to the Windows 11 user interface, this provided folks with a pleasant slope of technical learning while they executed their departure from Microsoft's popular operating system. On my technical suggestion, they made it a point to reach out to the downstream packagers because, from the Fedora Project packaging perspective, their packages were either wildly outdated or simply broken, thus hurting their adoption in the RPM-based universe. I also proposed the utilization of Fedora Linux for the development of the project's codebase, as we provided a speedy-moving development toolchain with updates that they could utilize.

While there were presentations and workshops scheduled throughout the first day, I still found myself spending most of my time in the hallway track. It was so easy to find someone I knew (or wanted to connect with) or something I knew (or wanted to know about) in all of the conversations. I also appreciated just how my fellow colleagues from Red Hat participated as volunteers for the event, all while sharing goodwill for potential long-term collaboration with the FOSSAsia organizers. This was around the time that the queue for availing lunch started forming at around 1200pm Indochina Time, so Samyak and I ended up joining in. Unfortunately, we had to push our lunch plans for later to make it to Praveen Kumar's interactive talk on Creating Custom Linux Images Using Bootc Technology and Podman Desktop. Delaying our lunch meals by about fifteen minutes or so allowed us to skip waiting in a long queue, but we did end up getting disappointed to notice that the menu had not changed for that day too. Do not get me wrong - the meal was okay for an obligatory refueling, but it left a lot to be desired when it came to ensuring that whatever ended up on our palate tasted good.

Finishing our meals allowed us to obtain some more energy to visit the community booths that seemed to have popped up later or had absent attendants. We started off with the MapConductor Project community booth, staffed by Masashi Katsumata, who briefed us about how they worked towards unifying all mapping APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for mobile application map SDKs (Software Development Kits). It was rather intriguing to know how these APIs could be integrated with MCPs (Model Context Protocols) to allow mobile applications to have a semantic understanding of the navigation utility. Using the puzzle question about the number of post offices in Japan was a fascinating way to draw a picture of the important purpose of this community project. We sifted through the ARM Project and RISC-V Project community booths with our discussions around the necessity of an alternative architecture for desktop computing amidst the exorbitant prices of the year 2026. The demos were made using a custom AlmaLinux distribution image flashed on a Raspberry Pi 500 Plus, which had the SBC (Single Board Computer) inside a mechanical keyboard.

This reminded me of the SyncStar Project that I worked on a couple of years back, when the Raspberry Pi computers were still generally accessible and not prohibitively expensive, as they had become by then. Returning to Aaditya allowed us to meet Rich Bowen, who was just heading out from the workshop at around 0100pm Indochina Time. It was delightful to catch up with him after having met him the last time during CentOS Connect 2025, and he was just as surprised to meet me here, since I was attending FOSSAsia for the first time. Wrapping up our conversations here, Samyak and I headed over to attend Shivani Bhardwaj's demonstration of Hands-on Network Security With Suricata. As someone who primarily works on infrastructure architecture, it was compelling to see just how the project worked both as an intrusion detection system as well as an intrusion prevention system. While her presentation was plagued with a bunch of technical issues related to the presenter's laptop inadvertently suspending, Shivani kept the audience engaged with her admirable showpersonship and funny jokes, giving me something to learn about too when it came to speaking.

We stayed back in the same hall to attend Peter Membrey's talk on Open Sourcing Secure GPU Workloads in Enclaves as it shared a similar cybersecurity-inclined theme. As he was the Chief Research Officer of ExpressVPN, an organization that was also one of the primary sponsors of the conference, I wanted to understand just how bought in they were with the free and open source software mission. Having gotten a satisfactory answer, I left to get a FOSSAsia tee-shirt and necessary caffeine, since I did not have to join the queue for the identification badge that morning. I was pleasantly corrected when they declined my payment for the FOSSAsia tee-shirt and informed me that this was available at zero extra cost for the event participants. The lack of a proper lunch did manage to keep me awake, but a proper shot of cold coffee was able to finally get me back into the game once I was done exchanging the participant coupons. I hung out with my fellow Red Hat colleagues at the OpenEuler Project community booth before going back to Aaditya's place. Since he had kept a medium-sized GNOME tee-shirt aside for me, it only made sense for me to pledge a certain amount to the community.

And might I add just how attractive of a bargain 100 Thai Baht was in exchange for a white GNOME round-necked tee-shirt, all while supporting the great work that they did! It could not be understated just how often free and open source software communities end up giving you friendships that you cherish for your lifetime. At around 0215pm Indochina Time, we attended Dakshita's presentation on Observability for Backend Developers before reaching out to the FOSSAsia volunteers regarding my concerns about the absence of speaker desks in various smaller-sized halls. While my concerns were accounted for by the staffing volunteers there, it was only when Rajan entered the scene that it was not only resolved for the training room that I had my presentation planned for the day after, but also for other associated halls. He mentioned to me how my preemptive concern about my deferred presentation allowed others to benefit too, since it had become unwieldy to use a lower-height general table. After having attended Joe Blubaugh's talk on SQL Expressions in Grafana Dashboards at around 0240pm Indochina Time, I decided to return to the hallway track to have some more conversations.

One discussion on internet technologies with the likes of Ananthu and Deepesh at the Debian Project community booth later, we were joined by an extremely enthusiastic Daniel J Blueman at the GNOME Foundation community booth. Since he had presented his talk about Linux on ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) Laptops earlier that day, he wanted to have a comparative study of how different both the architectures were on a quantitative level. While our collective had a qualitative understanding of just how efficient ARM-based SOCs (System On Chips) were as compared to the widely available x86-based CPUs (Central Processing Units), stress-ng testing (as requested by him) could help paint an accurate picture. While the tests were running on both Aaditya's power-deprived laptop and Daniel's cool-running laptop, he was appreciative of the attempts made to make Fedora Linux work on ARM-powered Apple MacBooks and general-purpose ARM-powered laptops. Although the initial tests gave us an idea about the performance per wattage across both the architectures, we had to dispose of the results as the x86-based laptop was not getting power from the wall, unlike the ARM-based one.

Of course, we had to have a rematch - not specifically for getting different-looking results but getting genuinely computed ones, and this time around it was the turn for Samyak's Lenovo ThinkPad P16v Gen 1. After making sure that both of these devices were getting enough juice from the power outlet and shutting down the unnecessary applications, we were able to obtain an anecdotal result that put the AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) Ryzen 7 Pro 7840HS CPU miles ahead of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC. This kind of unstructured research was able to draw quite a huge crowd in the second half of the day, and we deduced that while Samyak's laptop was drawing at most about 100 watts from the wall, Daniel's laptop was barely pulling at most around 25 watts. With improved compatibility across various applications and additional efforts in hardware enablement, the ARM-based SoCs could very well be the future of sustainable domestic general computing. After sharing contact details, Ananthu and I had a quick discussion on exploring places that exhibited (or franchised) anime-related swag, especially those from the popular Genshin Impact brand at around 0400pm Indochina Time.

With Samyak on his way back to the hotel room, Aaditya, Ananthu, and Shreenivas (who began hanging out with us at around that time) and I decided to stay back to attend the FOSSAsia Evening Social Event. I seemed to have chosen wisely, as I ended up running into Harish Pillay shortly after in the hallway track, whom I had last met during CHAOSScon EU 2024. In our friendly exchange, he shared how he used Anthropic Claude to generate slide decks based on the speaker notes that he had manually prepared, a process that felt flipped to me, but I was captivated to see the results that he had on display. I noted the effective learning for times with a shorter timeline for proposal submissions without having to compromise on the overall quality. After a couple of photographs with him, I joined back our little gang for a quick round of instant photoshoots with a hilarious set of props. Aaditya and I decided to split from the likes of Shreenivas and Ananthu for the day to have our snack bites at around 0700pm Indochina Time. We enjoyed the Thai cultural performance presented by the event volunteers before I decided to depart swiftly for the newly discovered Animate Store at the MBK Center.

Coordinating with Samyak again, I dropped off my stuff in my hotel room before leaving for the BTS SkyTrain at around 0715pm Indochina Time. Since MBK Center was around a ten-minute walk away from BTS Siam, and so was the Jain temple that he wanted to visit, we decided to travel together. Having one of those rare moments where Samyak was ready to leave before I was, we headed to an ATM to withdraw some money. Just like my arrival day, we had to cough up around 250 Thai Baht besides the actual amount, but that had nearly become something that we had gotten used to. Cash was indeed king in Thailand, and we had to ensure that we had enough money to not require another round of ATM withdrawals. After a forty-five-minute-long journey from BTS Udomsuk, we split at BTS Siam after deciding to meet up there at around 0930pm Indochina Time. Getting local Thailand SIM cards proved to be extremely beneficial, as that allowed us to stay connected with our friends and families while we were navigating the hustle and bustle of Bangkok. We did not worry about the possibility of getting lost during transit, as we could always find our way back to each other.

I was able to make it to Animate Store on the seventh floor of the sprawling MBK Center mall by around 0830pm Indochina Time, giving me roughly half an hour before the shop shuttered. Connecting remotely with Shounak Dey from back home, I made the best use of the time to collect some Genshin Impact collectibles for us. After making quite a lot of purchases from the official miHoYo swag catalog, I decided to be on my way back to BTS Siam right when Animate Store closed down for the day at around 0900pm Indochina Time. An uneventful BTS SkyTrain journey later, we found ourselves at BTS Udomsuk at around 1015pm Indochina Time with few choices for Indian cuisine, as most adjacent shops were closed and the farther restaurants would be closed by the time we would have gotten there. After a quick trip to an adjacent SevenEleven outlet and helping Samyak with packaged mineral water bottles from the day before, we decided to order some Indian cuisine takeaways from the Grab application. We decided to call it a day at around 1130pm Indochina Time after sharing a light dinner of some homestyle Indian meal together in my hotel room and going through a round of presentation prep.

The FOSSAsia 2026 event prioritized the friendly community interaction aspect of a free and open source software event by frontloading it on 08th March 2026 as a freely accessible event. This was surely a great example to learn from and implement at our flagship annual community conference, Flock To Fedora. I started the day by waking up as early as 0700am Indochina Time and giving Samyak Jain a wake-up call. As the timezone offset from Indian Standard Time was ninety minutes, I had to wait for some time before I could connect back home with my family members. Thankfully, the breakfast meal provided at Lumen Bangkok Udomsuk Station was a lot more flavourful and distinctive as compared to those that I was habituated to having at hotels in Europe. While there was a lot to be had for my dietary preferences, it was a tough time for Samyak in a mostly non-vegetarian selection of meals, so he had to request a custom vegetarian meal. Once we were through with breakfast, we started off for the FOSSAsia 2026 conference venue, True Digital Park West, at around 0930am Indochina Time.

As the venue was barely under a kilometer away from our stay, we were able to make it to the event on foot. While the summer season had not arrived in Thailand, it was still extremely humid, and we wanted to head indoors as soon as possible. Skipping the first couple of early sessions allowed us to get enough respite after a long yesterday, and that would mean that we could also last longer that day. After skipping through some floors of the True Digital Park Campus and connecting with the folks from the FOSSAsia Community Cycling Trip in the Telegram chat, we were finally able to make it to the right location. Following Mishari Muqbil's advice, we took the long escalator that skipped a couple of floors entirely to get us right in front of the event reception. The one thing that took me by surprise in Thailand was the fact that the ground floors were counted as the first floor, and there was no concept of a zero level. It was a pretty interesting observation that we had to mentally train ourselves to get used to, if we wanted to not get lost while visiting most (if not all) multi-storeyed buildings in Bangkok.

Walking through the premises, which astonishingly enough consisted of both student laboratories and shopping stores in equal measure, we entered the hall selection where FOSSAsia 2026 was organized. Surely, the volunteers could have done better at pointing folks to the correct place, but this feeling was quickly overridden when I ran into a bunch of acquainted and recent community friends. Getting to meet these people, mostly from APAC, at the event felt like making a victory lap to celebrate all the connections that I had painstakingly built throughout the last five years or so. Trying not to get swept away in all the interesting conversations, we were guided by an adjacent volunteer to get ourselves the badges, wristbands, and swag kits from the event reception. I was able to get those for myself as I was also participating in the conference as a speaker, but Samyak had to wait until the next day to obtain his badge. While we had the agency to join one of the running workshops at the time, we still decided to hang out at the hallway track a little longer to discuss open source strategies with the community.

After a brief catch-up with Ananthu CV from the Debian Project, whom I was meeting here after having done so during GNOME Asia 2024 and FOSDEM 2025, Samyak and I made it into the Eventyay Developer Workshop room at around 1045am Indochina Time. Although we initially thought that we were late, Norbert Preining, Srivastav Auswin, and Mario Behling were just getting started conducting a round of introductions for the folks present there. Since I was representing the Fedora Infrastructure in this workshop, I presented the case of how we used a similar event service platform, Pretalx, for our use case and how I was interested in learning all the various things EventYay had to offer. Amidst the feature run-through and tooling integrations, the workshop organizers had an interest in how the Fedora Project used Pretalx for running events like CentOS Connect and Flock To Fedora. Amidst the lack of proper seating in the room, I also got to meet Deepesh Nair briefly before agreeing to connect with Mario later for deeper discussions on how we could further collaborate in the future.

Hong Phuc Dang entered sometime later with an announcement for refreshments and some more seats for the workshop hall. This allowed the hall to be filled up a whole lot more as we headed back to the hallway track to meet with the likes of Aqsa Aqeel from DigitalOcean and Leon Nunes, who had begun his open source contribution journey. It was interesting to notice how the Fedora Project was the only RPM-based distribution on the scene there apart from our reliable downstream, Red Hat Enterprise Linux representatives. The distribution aspect of the event felt mostly occupied by the folks from Canonical and Debian, thus giving us the chance to capture some relevance. I briefly met up with Anuvrat Parashar and Shivani Parashar before having a conversation with Hong, who was surprised to note that the Fedora Project did not have a community booth. It turned out that there was another Call For Proposal form that was opened up closer to the commencement timeline, apart from the one for presentations and workshops, that I, as the event owner from the Fedora Project, was not even aware of.

This was also hinted at by Mishari in one of our conversations from the day before about the community booths being made available for free while the commercial booths were being charged a reasonable payment. In our discussions, Hong assured community support, and I discussed strategic collaboration before we had some quick photograph clicks to end the conversation. While not being able to have a community booth during FOSSAsia 2026 felt like a missed chance, I wanted to make the most of my participation as a community prospector for the Fedora Project's future participation in the event. We did not really have concrete plans on which workshops we would want to attend that day and were making our agenda on the fly. Making it back to the hallway track at around 1100am Indochina Time, I met up with the likes of Rajan Shah, Shivraj Patil, Veerkumar Patil, and Gaurav Kamathe from Red Hat, who were just arriving at the conference venue. It was hilarious to catch up with them here barely a couple of weeks after meeting them at the DevConf.IN 2026 conference in Pune, India.

At around 1130am Indochina Time, Samyak and I headed back into the rooms to attend presentations delivered not just in English but in a variety of languages. It was interesting to see just how open the FOSSAsia conference was to folks wanting to present their work in their own language, and when paired with a technology that live-transcribes it to a more generally known language, this could significantly lower the barrier of entry for these conferences. Most sessions, if not all, were bite-sized portions of fifteen minutes, and depending on who you are, the time management aspect of the presentation could be difficult. After exchanging the coffee coupon for a Dunkin-branded cold coffee and the meal coupon for a packed lunch, we headed out to chat with one of Samyak's friends from the Debian Project. We were able to make it back to Wendy Ha's talk on her experiences as an APAC Kubernetes Community Contributor, followed by Punsiri Boonyakiat's talk on balancing motherhood responsibilities with open source, which became a key highlight for International Women's Day.

On the second half of the community day, the host was doing absolutely terrific work keeping the audience entertained while the volunteer team looked into the technical problems that had crept in. Her fantastical oration with a deadpan expression did not allow our spirits to sour when the fixes were taking a little while longer. Contrary to my belief, the community day was not as occupied as I thought it would be due to its free-of-charge participation, but we were able to make the best of whoever was present on the ground. We also ran into Aaditya Singh from the GNOME Foundation and Mishari, who were just arriving at the conference venue in the afternoon, both of whom we were quite pleased to catch up with. After a quick conversation with Tamhant about the technological industry, I met up with Mario again to discuss how the Fedora Project evolved from a fragile ticket-based system to a robust dedicated event platform. It helped me understand how EventYay's Developer Preview Service could be accessed without having to establish the project environment locally.

As the Fedora Infrastructure's CommuniShift Project allowed for getting these deployments up and running in no time, I suggested the same to the EventYay developers, as they could find it handy to demonstrate this to the Fedora Project community. After running into Hong again, Samyak and I talked about how we could further push the adoption of the community day using interactive activities for folks hanging out on the hallway track. This would allow for greater participation on the community day, not just by those who have their talks planned but also by visitors. At around 0120pm Indochina Time, we made it to Peter Zaitsev's talk on Percona Project's attempts to make MySQL Community stronger. Apart from the obligatory jabs hurled at Oracle, there were also some tricky questions around the choice between MariaDB and MySQL if PerconaDB was not an option, addressed. We went on to attend Michael Meskes' talk on Open Source Business Models, which felt quite at home for us working with the Fedora Project as part of our responsibilities.

The "free" in a free and open source software project always comes with an asterisk marked hidden condition about the price being paid by someone else. The price is also usually not in the form of monetary payment, and that is what ends up hurting the longevity of these communities the most. After an insightful conversation on onboarding and retaining contributors, we headed out at around 0200pm Indochina Time to get another round of caffeine. We had discussions around the state of the warring world and how multiple cancelled flights through the Middle East affected selected speakers at FOSSAsia 2026. Aaditya welcomed us to station Fedora Project folks at the GNOME Foundation community booth since there would be enough space for both. As Samyak had stickers saved up from DevConf.IN 2026's Fedora Project community representation, we could use those here. Unfortunately, we could not meet Asmit Malakannawar, who planned to tag along with Aaditya, as his flights through the Middle East were also cancelled, and there were zero provisions made for remote talks.

Samyak and I headed back into the presentation rooms to attend Louis Yoong's talk on Building AI-Powered Interactive Maps with Open Data at around 0300pm Indochina Time, before attending a series of lightning talks from the Women In Tech category. After attending Velia Dang's informative talk on the reviewer's point of view when using EventYay and obtaining learnings to apply for Flock To Fedora, we decided to depart from the conference after the closing notes. While there were some activities planned at Lotus' Eatery for the Pre-Event Community Gathering, we wanted to use the remaining time of the day to explore what Bangkok had to offer. We were able to make it back to Lumen Bangkok Udomsuk Station by 0445pm Indochina Time before leaving again for the BTS SkyTrain after around forty-five minutes. With a rigid agenda to go with, we planned to visit Masaru, an anime collectible franchise store located near BTS Phra Khanong, which was barely four stops away from BTS Udomsuk. Ten minutes of train ride and five minutes of walking got us where we wanted to be.

We spent a little too long there than we could care to admit as Samyak got himself busy finding figurines while I was hunting for some Genshin Impact branded collectibles. Surprisingly enough, I was able to get a brokered change for the 1000 Thai Baht note that I was carrying while we were booking BTS SkyTrain tickets from BTS Phra Khanong to BTS Siam once we were done with our purchases at Masaru. It was going to be a comparatively longer ride with around eight stops and then a ten-minute walk to the world-famous MBK Center. At around 0800pm Indochina Time, we made it to BTS Siam station, but we kept getting sidetracked by the sprawling independent weekend market that we wanted to explore. With Samyak and me splitting again to find our pickings, I could not help but purchase some gifts for my family, including Hawaiian shirts, tourist hats, ornamental pendants, and much more. I was glad to have my wits about me while driving a hard bargain for making all these purchases because that would allow me to eventually purchase some more things in the end.

The humidity was making it tough, but we were finally able to push through to the indoors of the MBK Center by around 0845pm Indochina Time. Coincidentally, this is where we ended up finding one of the best independent handicraft stores, where Samyak and I got ourselves a wide assortment of personalized keychains and magnets for our friends and families. As our order was a massive one, with six for myself and six for him, we decided to depart after placing the order to see if we could make it to the anime café in time. The sprawling layout of the MBK Center only made it difficult for us to find our way - apart from, of course, getting sidetracked into purchasing Thailand incenses and local handicrafts. Splitting from Samyak again, who got busy with his purchases, I was able to make it to the place. To my utter disappointment, the shop had already closed by 0830pm Indochina Time, and I reached almost an hour late. I backtracked to where I last saw him, and we decided to head back to the handicraft store as we had to retrieve our orders right before the operations wrapped up for the day.

The enormous mall could be a treasure trove for those who know what they are looking for, but for the two of us exploring, it felt like an overwhelming labyrinth with similar looking pathways and deeply confusing corridors. We were finally able to make it to the handicraft store by around 0945pm Indochina Time, right at the time of the last handicraft being finalized. Since we had already cleared the bill, we headed back to BTS Siam while clicking pictures and discussing plans, only to end up boarding a rather crowded BTS SkyTrain on a weekend. By around 1045pm Indochina Time, we made it back to BTS Udomsuk, but after exploring the surrounding places to see where we could dine, we decided to order some food from the convenience of our hotel rooms using the Grab application. I got myself freshened up after requesting the hotel reception to retain the order, and I was glad to have ordered a carton of mineral water too. After a quick bite for dinner, I decided to call it a day with multiple precautionary alarms enabled to ensure that I woke up early the next day for the group photo.

As my arrival flight to Bangkok was scheduled to depart at around 0700am Indian Standard Time, I had to wake up as early as 0230am Indian Standard Time on 07th March 2026. The packing had already been taken care of previously, so all I had to take care of was ensuring that I got myself an Uber ride to the Pune International Airport in time. Thankfully, unlike my experiences from DevConf.IN 2026, I was able to get one pretty quickly, and at around 0400am Indian Standard Time, I reached the airport. The check-in process went smoothly, since I was not carrying much luggage anyway to begin with on my Air India Express flight. With my physical boarding pass in hand, I headed upstairs to wait for the immigration booths to open for the day. After forty-five minutes of waiting, the gates finally opened up, and I made it to the security check after smooth processing. The fact that I had my Thailand Digital Arrival Card registration done in advance helped me get through to the designated gate 1A without much hassle. I ended up having a lot of time left on my hands, so I decided to connect with the Egencia service about the troubled accommodation booking while I waited for boarding to begin.

Moving away from two noisy groups of travellers - one with senior citizens and one with rowdy men - I got myself a place to sit as I rang up the Egencia customer care helpline. Since 0530am Indian Standard Time was still a little early for their working hours, it took me a while to connect with a human representative. A helpful attendant attempted to connect with the Lumen Bangkok Udomsuk Station hotel employees, but that did not work out. I decided to board the flight anyway at around 0645am Indian Standard Time and leave the concerns about the troubled accommodation booking for when I would have reached Bangkok. There was not much that I could have done at that time to help the situation, and besides the issues that we had with Egencia regarding the flight confirmation, this worry would most likely have soured my entire experience. After a quick switch of seats from 7A to 6A, on a fellow passenger's request, I decided to watch some movies, such as Code 3 (2025) and Zootopia 2 (2025), on my phone. The Kebab Platter was soon served, and that allowed me to catch up on some rest that I was lacking due to having to wake up early in the morning just to make it to the airport.

The flight soon landed at the Suvarnabhumi Bangkok International Airport at around 1230pm Indochina Time, and after connecting with my family to let them know about my safe arrival, I headed swiftly into the immigration queue. The overcrowded traveller collective took me about forty-five minutes to make it through to the other side, where I found that the designated luggage belt #21 had finished delivering all of its luggage. After crossing a big group of Chinese travellers, I got myself a data plan from True 5G at the airport exit. 599 Thai Baht for 8 days of unlimited service was a great deal, and that allowed me to stay connected with both my family and friends, and with Samyak Jain, with whom I was representing the Fedora Project APAC community at FOSSAsia 2026. The humidity I faced after stepping out of the airport took me by surprise because it was even warmer there than it was in India. After unsuccessfully looking for a Grab ride that I had booked for about thirty minutes or so, I finally got one whose driver did a great job crossing over the language barrier and explaining where to find them amidst a rather crowded station of rides available for hire and buses that went into the city.

I connected with Samyak while I started off on the road at around 0230pm Indochina Time to instruct him about Airport Gate #4, where he could avail himself of a Grab ride, and that way he could avoid wasting that thirty minutes like I did. While connecting with my family during the Grab ride, I also commended the driver for just how clear they were with their communication while making the best utilization of the Grab application's live message translation feature for international travellers. I did not realize how swiftly I managed to reach the hotel at about 0315pm Indochina Time after all the immigration and cabbing troubles. Thankfully, the folks at the Lumen Bangkok Udomsuk Station gave me no trouble with the booking, and I was able to check into my room #703 rather swiftly. In contrast to the experience that I thought I would have, they also topped off their welcoming gesture with a cool popsicle-like snack as I headed downstairs to fetch the passport that I had left at the reception. With one less thing to worry about, Samyak and I still had to make it to the BTS Chit Lom station by 0430pm Indochina Time to meet up and join the FOSSAsia Community Cycling trip.

As Samyak touched down at around 0230pm Indochina Time, I had to proceed by myself to meet up with Mishari Muqbil after a quick changeover in my hotel room. After a brief struggle with finding an ATM and then losing about 250 Thai Baht for the international conversion, I made it back to the BTS Udomsuk station, which only accepted cash (and did not even provide receipts to track expenses!) but was thankfully situated right in front of my hotel. It took me thirty minutes to make it to the BTS Chit Lom station at around 0415pm Indochina Time, but I had to spend the remaining thirty minutes chasing Mishari's waypoint on Google Maps. As I flew in my bicycle helmet all the way from Pune, I had no plans of skipping the FOSSAsia Community Cycling Trip, and while it was my first time visiting Thailand, I did find myself audaciously picking trains and walking through as if I was exploring my backyard. I think I might have to credit the hotel reception and the BTS security for their welcoming behaviour, which made me want to leave the hotel room right after arrival because I genuinely wanted to experience more of what Bangkok had to offer, even when I was dead tired from the travels.

I was finally able to make it to the river jetty, where I met up with Mishari, Michael Christen, Anuvrat Parashar, Shivani Parashar, and others. The adventurous ordeal of catching up with them was rewarded with a scenic boat ride to the starting point of the FOSSAsia Community Cycling Trip. I managed to learn more about what Michael does with his work on YaCy and shared what I do as a part of the Fedora Council, the Fedora Mindshare, and the Fedora Infrastructure teams in the Fedora Project community activities. There were folks there for the first time like myself, and there were also those who had attended FOSSAsia since its beginning, so it was enlightening to know their experiences from this conference. During a brisk walk-and-talk with Anuvrat and other participants to the starting point of the cycling trip, I got to know about his frequent involvement in the PyCon organization and DGPLUG communities. Once we were joined by a couple of Mishari's friends and Wendy Ha, we began unlocking the rental bicycles using our HelloRide application, and Mishari gave us a quick orientation about street safety regulations at around 0530pm Indochina Time.

And there began our slow-paced ride through the alleys and streets of Bangkok! With Mishari and his friends leading our collective, I found myself at the start of our sequence, discussing with Bee about his involvement in technology. As a proving ground for their cartographic skills, we wove through a lot of parks, and I noticed a great number of cats along the various pathways we took. Since the cycling trip did not have many elevation changes to deal with, I took the liberty of falling behind in the sequence to chat with the likes of Wendy and Michael every now and then. At around 0630pm Indochina Time, we made our first stop at an independent family-owned chocolate store where we sampled many chocolates and purchased some beverages too. We were able to keep our rental bicycles safe using Mishari's (as Shivani hilariously named) "CYCLE-ogical protection," which mostly consisted of a loosely placed rope. This first stop also allowed Samyak to finally catch up with our collective, as I discovered him coincidentally heading in the opposite direction when we were on our way out. Tracking his location over WhatsApp's location sharing definitely seems to have been the right choice.

It was rather funny to finally catch up with Samyak on a random Bangkok evening street after having missed the chance at the airport and at the hotel. Our collective made the next stop at another independent family-owned ice cream parlour located in a deep alleyway at around 0700pm Indochina Time. While the location was tucked away in a seemingly long-forgotten corner of Bangkok, the place definitely had a very home-like feeling to it. We, of course, got busy sampling undiscovered flavours and ordering favourite ones for the break. After spending another thirty minutes there with my Butterfly Pea cold cone (and some obligatory badly written jokes by Mishari), we had a bunch of photographs clicked. Once we departed from the ice cream parlour, we found ourselves pausing every now and then due to certain cartographically inclined confusions, but our "vibe-riding" (as I hilariously named our fun experience) never had a dull moment. Through the riverside pathways to a restricted university, we seemed to be in the front seat of exploring what stories these streets and alleys of Bangkok had to offer—and as tired as I was, it still felt like we were just getting started and there was more to discover!

While we did have a bunch of registrations for the FOSSAsia community cycling trip, we barely had half of them turn up, so Mishari decided that it would be best if we found ourselves a dining place. After he quickly helped Samyak with his bicycle height, we caught up with the remaining group for yet another round of photographs - this time in front of a Bumblebee statue at a cross-section, if you can believe it. We also halted in front of the Royal Palace for a quick shoot before inching closer to the nearest drop-off point for the HelloRide rental bicycle center. Thankfully, I was able to take Bee's sweet custom ride for a quick spin before leaving, as it was filled to the brim with all the bells and whistles for an exhilarating street cycling experience. With about 80 Thai Baht spent for the HelloRide trip, some of us made it to the KemKon Vegan Experience Restaurant. As both Samyak and I had skipped lunch and exerted ourselves since the morning, we were starving. I was glad to note that while the menu was completely vegan, I still ended up liking the Make-believe Fried Fish Fritters that I had ordered for myself, both for the delicious taste and the quick service.

Apart from the nutritional values, of course, it was astonishing to notice just how close the vegan dish ended up tasting like a non-vegetarian one. Adding some spicy chili-flavoured oil on top of it all made it taste like heaven, and I could not see a better way to end the night than with this amazing meal. After clearing our bills, Shivani and Anuvrat stayed back at the market to explore some more, while Samyak, Mishari, and I headed back to the main road to catch a Grab ride to the hotel. It was magical just how we felt at home connecting with folks from various free and open-source software communities, all while doing activities like riding bicycles or sharing meals. The two of us were soon back in our hotel rooms, and apart from one misadventure of requiring the hotel staff's assistance to unlock the heavily jammed bathroom door, our arrival in Bangkok was super awesome. After a quick message to Julia Bley to inform her about our safe arrival at the conference and to conclude our saga of troubled travels, I called it a day at around 1130pm Indochina Time. There was so much to look forward to at the Community Day in FOSSAsia 2026, and I wanted to ensure that I was rested enough to experience the same.