I volunteer and contribute to various Libre (free) software communities using the synecdoche (bahuvrihi in Sanskrit) pseudonym, ॥ स्वक्ष ॥ "svaksha", meaning "beautiful eyes" in Sanskrit and philosophically characterizes void, null or zero.

You are what your deepest desire is ;
As you desire, so is your intention ;
As your intention, so is your will ;
As is your will, so is your deed ;
As is your deed, so is your destiny || ~ Upanishads ||


Since 2005, larger chunks of my time are spent contributing to the following FLOSS projects (in random order) ::

Developer (Bioinformatics) Intern, The Scripps Research Institute.

[★] Worked on re-building the back-end architecture as a flexible "Gene Annotation As A Service" plugin for a gene annotation data retrieval and bioinformatics query service portal, serving biological data via the backend MongoDB framework to automatically build gene annotation indexes from all available (pre-defined set of) biological data sources. And I gave a talk about it at Pycon-CA 2012, Toronto.

PYTHON

[★] Organized a one-day Pandas workshop and sprint, lead by ChangShe, a Pandas core-developer, which sold out pretty quickly. I've written some blog posts about it here.

[★] As a Pythonista, I help admin the diversity and conferences mailing lists, squashed tiny bugs on the old Pycon website.


Mentor for Apertium , Google Code-In

[★] Mentored students with Apertium installation issues, provided guidance for technical tasks and verified the translation quality for Hindi language tasks during Google Code-In, held from 2010Nov. to 2011Jan.

Systers (Developer Intern, Google Summer of Code)

[★] Completed the Patches, Release and Testing Automation Project for Systers, a US-registered non-profit organisation for Women in Computing.


DEBIAN

[★] Wrote a Sanskrit (SA) language locale with Christian Perrier, Oct2005. This is available in the Debian package “belocs-locales-data” and also in package “locales (version: 2.3.5-6)”. Sometime in the future, I hope to improve my Debian packaging-fu.


UBUNTU

[★] Founded Ubuntu-Women in Jan-2006, for which I designed, created wrote and maintained the contents for the initial static HTML pages (which was used till 2012), including the wiki pages on the UW website. Currently administrator the UW mailing list and IRC channel, and also provide technical support and mentor women to participate and contribute to FLOSS.
[★] Over the years UW has increased the number of women in the community, and actively ensures an equal space for women within the community and the long term goal would be to ensure that Libre software communities improve to such an extent that *-women and other diversity groups blend into the mainstream community.
[★] Having been an editor at Ubuntu-Fridge from 2006-2011, I also helped with the Ubuntu bug-squad team till 2008. On 2006Aug22, I had applied and became an Ubuntu member but, when it expired in 2008, I never re-applied as I felt I could contribute sans status symbols like an "@Ubuntu" email id. I am still around, if that is what counts. If you are curious, feel free to spend time on my old unmaintained Ubuntu Wiki Page and/or the LP account which contains details of older Ubuntu work.


WFS (Women in Free Software, an FSF.org initiative)

[★] Volunteer admin for the Women in Free Software Planet , 2009.


KDE-Women

[★] Was a list administrator/owner for the KDE-Women mailing list from March2007 to May2010.

LINUXCHIX

[★] I was the Job-posts admin from Jan2005 to May2010, currently one-sixth of an administrator for the Newchix and Indichix mailing lists. I am also the one-third admin on the IRC server.
[★] In July2005, Archana Raghupathy, of Chennai, founded the LinuxChix-India (LC-IN) chapter and two years later we moved to our new Indichix mailing list and were also featured in an article in the Economic Times.  This group has some fantastic women where one can learn the ropes of online communication in Linux communities and their positive attitude of "being polite and helpful" is quite infectious.

FOSS Repos

[★] Bitbucket :: https://bitbucket.org/svaksha/
 
[★] Github :: https://github.com/svaksha

[★] Launchpad: http://launchpad.net/~svaksha

IN THE PRESS

[★] An Economic Times article.
[★] 2009: An Open Source Business Resource: "Women in Open Source" by Cathy Malmrose.

The GNU-GPL philosophy was an inspiring force, turning me into a Libre software contributor and volunteer. As an autodidact Linux learner, I enjoyed learning from online resources peppered with guidance from community experts and started out with DMOZ.org and Wikipedia.org. I'm a  helpful spirit who dedicates a lot of personal time to various Libre projects to help the community grow, as I believe that we cannot simply consume Free/Libre software without fostering the spirit of sharing knowledge and contributing to the pool we draw from. This can only be done by encouraging and welcoming contributors to work on all aspects of Libre software development -::- Besides writing code, we need to encourage  people to contribute time to tasks that will help maintain Libre software, help package software for distros like Debian/Ubuntu, clean up wiki page spam, filing bugs and bug squashing, doing artwork, organizing events and hack-a-thons, anything else that interests them.

This personal blog is aggregated only on planets that allow full feeds, since Libre software is just one facet of my life and my creative literary urge is inversely proportional to my dislike of blogging for publicity and site-hits, which is directly proportional to the degree of laziness that motivates me to musically annotate posts crafted with care, while ranting about "politic(ian)s and corruption or sexism and the terrible state of women's rights in India", the violence we endure, all of which definitely need a lot of brain food. In toto, I take Downes advice for bloggers seriously :-)


Thanks for reading!

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