IndiaFOSS 2026 - up the fomo

Lord Bogdanoff, IndiaFOSS 2026 was a stunning success.

Published: Sep 30, 2026 · 4–5 min read

Day 1

To start off, I almost got admitted into NIMHANS.

NIMHANS Convention Centre is not the same as NIMHANS the institution 😭. When I accidentally parked in the latter and asked a security guard where I could find IndiaFOSS, he sent me to the nearest counter to book an appointment. Thankfully, akhileshwar helped me find the convention centre.

Breakfast gets too crowded at 9. 8:30 is the perfect time to arrive.

Day 1 was idli sambar with crisp vadas and chutney. They were really good (also I was really hungry, maybe that's why).

Two idlis and a medu vada on a white plate, with green chutney and a cup of sambar.

The day was mostly me, akhileshwar, nikhil, amara, and adithya.

All five of us on a bench outside, under the palm trees.

I also got to meet Priyanshu and Souhrudh pretty early on, which was really refreshing!

We mostly looked around the hardware room and the stalls on the first floor. The ATLAS GC was especially active today, with people buzzing about their ride to the convention and the things they had seen.

I also learned more about Xeneva OS and met Axiss (Karthik), who surprised me with the Flipper Zero launch in India. It was the launch day itself, iirc.

We then took a group photo of mostly students who came from Amrita, which turned out to be a lot! Next time, expect a lot more blogs from Amrita students who go to IndiaFOSS 2027.

The rest of us from Amrita, posing in front of a United By FOSS board.

Around this time I got to meet namish!! It was the first time we met IRL after being online friends for so long. (Thankfully, he wasn't a 50-year-old groomer, but rather quite a handsome lad I must say.)

I also collected lots of stickers on day 1!

A handful of stickers, with a FreeBSD devil on top.

A stall that I really liked was Diagram Chasing, for the cool things that they do.

We also met Vonter, who was representing OSM at that time. A friend of mine spoke about an RL project that he had done using OSM, and I brought up map.amrita.town and bmtc.nithitsuki.com. We sometimes take these great efforts for granted. OSM is so cool. He also asked us to take some OSM stickers to share around the campus!

random pic to end the day

A selfie of me with Nikhil and Amara in the hall.

Day 2

Day 2 was surprisingly much slower than Saturday. Most booths were not set up for a good while, and the crowd was much smaller, probably because most of them had already walked 20,000-plus steps on Saturday. It was exhausting in the best way possible.

As for the talks I attended, it is basically the same as Adithya's write-up.

I especially enjoyed my friend Mukesh's talk on seqout, which I had naturally discovered for my ML project a few months before the talk. It was insane to think that the person I met online through a project I found on GitHub ended up in me taking part in developing a bit of ring.seggs.lol, and me going to his talk on creating seqout.

Here's a picture from Aman's slides on animating GTK.

A talk slide showing a hand-drawn stick figure with X eyes beside the misspelled word Animater.

Day 1 was mostly checking out stalls and meeting cool people, while I spent Day 2 on talks… except another amazing stall called bengawalk (they do AMAZING work, please check them out if you're in Bangalore), where I learnt about the already public reverse-engineered BMTC API here. Vonter was also manning the OSM stall, where we had a geography quiz with Souhrudh and akhileshwar (we failed gloriously). But while attempting the quiz, Vonter was also giving us SHEETS of OSM stickers to spread the word across our campus (which I definitely will).

(P.S. the limited edition BMTC blow-up t-shirt bengawalk merch was soooo cool!)

During lunch, we decided to take a picture of Harsha's hornet doll on my motorcycle called hornet, for some hornet-on-hornet action (take your mind outta the gutter).

A red Honda Hornet parked on the street, with a small crocheted toy on the seat.

We also got to see the cool lightsaber prophesied about.

Me holding a lightsaber with a pale wooden hilt and a bright green blade, photographed from below under the venue's ceiling lights.

The amazing lightsaber was made by the folks at absurd.industries.

Here's a fit check of me, namish, rohith, and aspizu.

The group looking down at the Threadlocked shirt I was wearing.

And to top it off, a picture with ATLAS and friends from amFOSS (atlasdev.club and amfoss.in).

A second group photo, in front of the same United By FOSS board.

Conclusion

All in all, what a LOVELY time IndiaFOSS was. I really want to give a talk myself for IndiaFOSS 2027, maybe even have a stall for atlasdev.club. But all things considered, this was easily the best tech 'event' (or festival) that I've attended, close to none.

Sources

Sources for inspiration, and more IndiaFOSS blogs.

IndiaFOSS 4.0 by polarhive. Loved the picture-first approach.
IndiaFOSS 2026 by Adithya Nair.
IndiaFOSS 2026 by Fenil Jain.
My experience at IndiaFOSS 2026 by msfjarvis.
IndiaFOSS 2026 by Yash Garg.
weeknotes/2026-10-03 by aspizu (I'm the one who took the pic)
Reflections from IndiaFOSS 2026 by Kaustubh. (I completely resonate with IndiaFOSS being a festival and not a conference, and you will feel it when you experience it.)

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