Multi-Layer Organic Workshop by Akash Chaurasia
I attended a 5-Days organic farming workshop by Akash Chaurasia at the Sri Paripoorna Sanathana Ayurveda Medical College between 15th-19th Dec’22. It was a complete hands-on workshop on the fields with lots of insights. Some of the important things I learned and observed are:-
- Agriculture is the mother all industries. Many works because of this.
- Soil and water quality is decreasing day by day.
- In the last 50-60 years, we have given more importance to man-made fertilizers, pesticides to more production but completely forgot how nature takes care of itself.
- Most of the farmers have very small land holdings and they need some ways of regular income. Earning just twice a year is not sufficient and can be times risky times.
- There are a lot of people who are coming back to farming. In our group there were many folks who left the corporate world and now full time into farming.
- We need to enable farmers to from produce to product to get the most benefit of the value chain.
- We need think Farming as another profession and bring more professionalism.
- Indian (Desi) Cows plays are indispensable part of the entire farming process. We should understand their importance and work towards educating others.
- There is an urgent need to revert back to natural and organic way of farming.
There were many more learnings but for some other time. For now let me share some details about day to day activities.
On Day – 1, after the inaugural ceremony Akash gave us the presentation on organic farming and then went to the field for the soil treatment.
On Day – 2, we had a session on multi layer farming in which we discussed about different layers, farm layout and soil treatment. After that we setup the main bamboo structure for the multi layer farming.
On Day – 3, we learnt and did the the wiring setup on top of bamboo; which would help us holding the structure and help creepers grow. After our workshop we were joined by Kamal Taori and Irmel Marla Ji, who shared their pain on why India is recognising its potential. Kamal ji also shared the importance of marketing and value addition, in the organic farming sector. If a farmer can not get at-least 1.5x of the input price, then he/she would leave the farming and everyone nodded to it. Both of them have also written a book – Marketing the unmarketed and done some amazing work in the field.
On Day – 4, We added the net across the structure and covered the top using the maize paddy to let around 50% of the Sun raises some in. After the entire setup it was feeling so comfy inside.
Post that we created farming beds, learnt about the seed management and even sowed the seeds as well. Late in the evening Akash also shared the details about the complete and balanced diet for the plants.
On Day 5, Akash shared diet plan for the Indian cows, seeds selection and storing process and how a model 4 Acre farms should look like. He then stressed on why farmers should create products from their on own produce, to get most of their efforts.
After that we had the closing ceremony and certificate distribution. Post lunch we went to a Gaushala and then left to start our own journey and share our learnings. Those 5 days went very quickly. We learnt a lot from everyone, had some great food and made some good friends as well.
I appreciate Akash’s effort to share his knowledge freely to others. You can follow him on Facebook and YouTube. He organises one such workshop in his hometown, Sagar (M.P.) every month and do workshops across India. I am also native from the same region and hearing him with our local dialect was great fun. I would also like to thank all the organisers and college for all the arrangements.
I have setup a partial multi layer terrace garden last year with the help of Mr Krishna Kumar of Quantum Leap and he suggested that I should attend this workshop.
I know managing a farm would be completely different than a terrace garden but it is a start. We, as family have a close to none land holdings. For now I would like to join my farmer friends in their journey of multi-layer farming by spending sometime in the fields and then may be one fine day …… .
Introducing Kubernetes and Cloud Native Online Meetup
I always loved organizing meetups but decided to step down as organizer of the meetup I ran for close to 5 years. That decision was primarily due to time constraints and changing priorities. It was difficult to take time off during weekends and taking care of all the logistics. But I am very happy the new organizer has taken that group to the next level.
To be honest I missed all the fun of organizing meetups and wanted to do something about it without giving up my Saturdays. Going online completely seemed a good option but could not bring it into execution.
Given the current situation we are in I am thinking of giving it a try. That is why today I created a meetup group “Kubernetes & Cloud Native Online Meetup” and scheduling our session on Kustomize, which a template-free way to customize the applications on Kubernetes. It is scheduled for Monday, 23rd March at 7:30 PM IST. You can RSVP at the meetup page and we’ll send you the link to join later this week.
By going online we would be able to:-
- save time and money for everyone
- have more industry experts to share the knowledge, which is not possible otherwise
- reach to the audience from other cities than just Bengaluru
I hope that with the support of everyone we can make it as successful as our physical meetups are. See you soon!!!
Future Tech Blogs on neependra.net
From now on I would be using this space (neependra.net) for non-tech and personal blogs. All the tech, meetup etc blogs would now go to my company’s blog.
Docker 4th B’day Celebration – Bangalore
In Bangalore we celebrated Docker’s 4th Birthday at Microsoft Office on 25th March’17. Over 300 participants signed up and around 100 turned up for the event. We had around 15 mentors. We started the event at 9:30 AM. After a quick round to introduction with Mentors, participants started doing the Docker Birthday Labs. Docker community and team have done a great job in creating self explanatory labs with Play with Docker environment.
Most of the participants followed the instructions on their own and where ever needed, mentors helped the participants. Around 11:30 AM our host Sudhir gave a quick demo Azure Container Service and then we did the cake cutting. This time only one girl attended the meetup event, so we requested her to cut the cake.
After that we had light snacks and spent time in networking. It was great event and I am sure participants would have learnt something new.
Thanks to Usha and Sudhir from Microsoft for hosting the event. In the next meetup we collaborating with 7th other meetup of Bangalore and doing a event on Microservices and Serverless.
Join us for next community event on Microservices and Serverless
If you are following the updates here then you would know that in Feb’17 AWS, DevOp and Docker meetup group of Bangalore did a combined event in the following proposed community driven event format.
Instead of INR 200 we charged INR 100 and did not look for sponsors. With all the collected money we gave gifts and prizes to speakers and participants respectively. We received very good feedback about the event. In that event we decided to next event around Microservices and Serverless. This time even more meetup groups are coming together. Following 8 meetup groups would be joining hands this time :-
This is going to be one great event as we have already received good amount of talk proposals and are looking for more until 7th April. If you are interested then please submit your talk proposal here. And if you would like to attend the event then go respective meetup group and purchase the INR 100 ticket.
Bangalore Kubernetes Meetup #4 and update on next community event
Last weekend we had 4th Kubernetes Meetup in Bangalore at VMware’s office. More than 100 people signed and ~40 people showed up. The first session was from Akshay Mathur and Manu Dilip Shah of A10 Networks who shared their experience on choosing and using Kubernetes for their product.
The next session was from Krishna Kumar and Dhilip Kumar from Huawei who talked about managing stateful application with Kubernetes. Krishna first gave us good overview and then Dhilip showed us a demo. He also urged participant to join Kubernetes Stateful SIG.
The last talk was from Magesh and Kumar Gaurav of VMware on using using k8s to orchestrate VMware SaaS. It was an interesting talk on which Magesh talk about some real problems his team has faced.
Some participants asked about comparing Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos Marathon and other container orchestration. We had brief discussion about I share my last year’s LinuxCon/ContainerCon EU workshop on comparing different container orchestrators.
We also talked about on what we should do in in the next Kubernetes meetup. We might do hands-on labs.
In the end I also shared the details about the community event we are doing in conjunction with other meetup groups like one we did few weeks back AWS, DevOps and Docker meetup groups. In April we plan to do similar event on Microservices and Serverless. Other than previous participants Kubernetes and Mesos & CNCF meetup group would also be joining it.
It was a good meetup. Thanks for the organisers and speakers.
AWS, DevOps and Docker Meetup
Continuing our experiment with community driven conference, this time AWS,DevOps and Docker meetup collaborated to do a combined meetup. We charged INR 100 to each participants to make sure they are really interested in coming. From the collected money we gave gifts to speakers and some prized to the participants. The meetup was hosted at Bangalore’s LinkedIn office. It was really nice venue and and everything went as expected.
AWS, DevOps and Docker Meetup – Feb’17
Out of 150 participants ~140 showed up, which is really nice. Some people came from Chennai and Cochin as well. So putting a nominal fee really works :). We started almost on time. The first talk was from Neeraj Shah from Minjar Cloud. He shared his experience on how he deployed application on ECS. He mentioned the advantages of using ECS to deploy Docker based application on Cloud and why one should use it.
Next talk was on from Mohit Sethi, who talked about managing storage in containerised environments.
Sreenivas Makam then talked about Docker 1.13 experimental features. He briefly introduced us with new features of Docker 1.13 and then focussed on experimental feature. Experimental features can enabled from stable binary only, which is a real help for anyone who wants to try out upcoming Docker features. In the end we also good discussion about Docker Stack.
We took a quick break after that and had quick intro session with all the organisers. After the break Madan shared some great tips on saving cost with AWS.
After that Shamasis shared Postman’s scaling journey with Docker and AWS Beanstalk. It was really fascinating.
In the first Flash talk Gourav Shah open-sourced a project on creating Devops workspaces using Docker. Generally one is required to have more than one machined to try DevOps tools like Chef, Puppet Ansible etc. With this tool one can build a multi-node setup using Docker and do different labs.
The last session was from Mitesh, who showed to use Jenkins and CodeDeploy to deploy the applications on AWS.
All of the sessions were very informative, venue was host, participants were eager to learn. I think it was really good meetup.
Thanks to all the speakers and our host Bathri and Sethil at LinkedIn. Thanks to organisers for AWS and DevOps meetup group specially Mohit and Habeeb.
During the meetup some other meetup groups came forward to join us next time. We might do something around Micro-services and Serverless in April last week in the similar mode. So stay tuned 🙂
Bangalore Docker Meetup # 24
We did our first meetup for 2017 at GO-Jek’s engineering office in Bangalore. ~400 people rsvped and ~120 people came for the meetup. This is first time we tried to live-stream and record the videos. Though we could not record all the videos due to out lack of experience but still we got two complete ones, which I think is a good start. This first session was from Nishant Totla of Docker. He talked about Docker Swarm and Swarmkit.
The next session was from Saifi Khan who talked about Docker on Windows. He had no slides but demos. Somehow he had an issue with the display driver so we could not see the demo but even without any slides and demo, he engaged the audience with nicely and had very interactive Q & A session.
After Saifi, Thomas Chacko talked about Serverless Computing and Docker. He have very informative overview with some demos.
Next was Kiran Mova form OpenEBS, who talked about Emerging storage technologies for containers.
Lastly I gave a demo on Jenkin’s Docker Plugin and how we can the Jenkins pipeline to build CI/CD environment.
Within the community we were discussing about the community driven mini-conference/larger meetup for some time, which I documented here. Lets see if we can take it forward or not.
I also shared the details about the MOOC on container technologies which my company is launching on 14th Jan’17. The first course would be on Containers Fundamentals. You can find more details here.
We plan to live-stream and record future meetups. Hope to do better next time.
Time for Community Driven Conference/Larger Meetup ?
You name the technology and you would find active meetup in Bangalore. Be it Docker, DevOps, AWS, GlusterFS, Machine Learning etc. Every meetup group meets at-least once in every two months and share the knowledge. These days cloud, be it public or private seems to common platform for everyone and containers are slowly becoming unit of execution. There are few conferences which are dedicated on these topics which bring people together. This idea is on similar lines but the quest is whether can we do a conference which driven by the community ?
Last year Docker and DevOps meetup group did a joint one day meetup, for which we received good feedback. By doing such a joint meetup we can extend it to mini-conference but there are few questions which arise :-
- Who would provide the venue ?
- What if we announce the conference, sell few tickets but don’t have enough fund to pull it off ?
- What if we don’t find the sponsors ?
- etc..
Can we play safe here ? May be Yes !!! With discussion with some of the other meetup organiser we thought of following:-
We’ll open-up 200 registration in the beginning and then ask people to pay 200 per ticket. 200 registrations because that is what we can accommodate in a meetup, if event does not happen. We are charging some money to make sure participant is really interested.
Once 200 people are signed up we can go to companies for sponsoring the venue. The company can pay us or directly to the venue/event management. If we don’t get the sponsorship then we’ll just to a meetup as usual. Whatever money we collected so far, we can give that back in prizes during the meetup.
Sounds good ?? This is just a concept now. Lets see if we can take it forward in next week or so. Do leave your comments if you suggestions/idea ?
A year on my own…
Today I completed one year of being on my own.
In 2004, after graduating from college and doing brief experiment with a startup I came to Pune, looking for a job. I failed clearing the interviews of many MNCs. In the last two and a half years of my college I spent most of my time learning Linux and Computer networks. So, I decided to narrow down my search where there is requirement of some Linux Admin work and after giving my first interview, I got the job. Anyways coming forward, I do had some plans after leaving my full time job but didn’t know what coming next. As last time Linux helped again but this time in the form of The Linux Foundation. I got an assignment from The Linux Foundation to build a self paced course on “Cloud Infrastructure Technologies”, which got launched in June’16.
Between Dec’15 – March’16 months I also gave free containers(Docker) workshops in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkatta. At the same time I gave some paid workshops as well.
Within a month after leaving my job I realised how easy it be an employee than your own boss. One has to manage his/her time, next month’s pay check, family, health and so on without loosing the cool. After going through on my own I started to respect entrepreneurs, self employed, my local vendors, auto rickshaw drivers etc more.
Less sleep, lot of work took a toll on my body and I got struck with Bell’s Palsy in Jan’16. It was very scary to go under MRI in the middle of nigh for the checkup. It took me few months to recover. This definitely effected my work and I had to re-organise myself. As everyone I thought of getting some interns and employees but that did not work either. I spent my time, energy and money to make them upto speed but did not succeed either. It was difficult to part ways with some of them but I am happy that we did that in good terms. It was a good experience which I think can come only with few mistake. I learnt one very important lesson “Never hire a full-time until I am 100% satisfied”.
The formal registration of the company did not happen until May 2016. It is one marathon task as well. Working with Charted Account to get all documentation is not fun but it has to be done anyway. For registration I had to also give a company name. I spent good amount of time think about it. I was looking for some inspiration/help which I got from Ranga Shankara, a theatre in Bangalore and very near to my office. On my way to back from daily visit to a coffee shop I saw the board for theatre festival “Youth Yuga”. In hindi “Yuga” means “Era”, which made me think that is an era of cloud computing. So why not name my company “CloudYuga”. I took the “.guru” domain as in next year or two I would focusing on trainings.
Till Dec’15 to July’16 we worked from Bangalore Alpha Lab and then moved to our own office. It was fun to see the our own office taking shape.
Throughout the year I was engaged with Docker Community, which helped me both professionally and psychologically. I became part of Docker Captain’s program, which was a good confidence booster. In Bangalore I organised Docker meetups, which kept me well connected with local community. On my own I attended different international conferences DevConf’16, DockerCon’16 and LinuxCon/ContainerCon’16 & spoke in two of them .
When I started last year I told my family that lets see for 6 months and if things does not work out then I can go back to full time again. Its been year and I have things in pipeline for next 6 months, which is good. My family supported me very well, specially my wife Kanika who also joined to work with me part time since last few months.
Till now my focus has been training than consulting, which I believe would continue for some time. I see good amount skill gap in adopting container technologies.. good for me !!. Over the year I got some corporate clients for trainings which I think would continue to grow. Here is the group photo of the container (Docker) training I delivered today in Pune.
Some of learning from last year’s experience are:-
- There are more good people in the world than we think. They are willing to help you.
- Reach out to people with helping hand.
- Give priority to health.
- Be true to yourself and things would fall in place.
Its been a fun ride with lots of new experienced. Lets see how far we can go !!