Gnunify’12 and Programming Contest

Gnunify was scheduled on 10th and 11th February’12. This year Gnunify has completed 10 years.It has come a long way and I am attached with it since 2006. Since last year I started to more active part by organizing the programming contest for System Programming. We declare the topics for the programming contest one month so that students can go back go back and study those topics which were declared if they haven’t read them seriously till now. The topics from this year were:-

– Process
– Process Control
– File I/O
– Signals
– Locking Primitives(Mutex/Semaphores)
– Multi Threading

This year my company STEC sponsored this contest. We got 100+ registration but around 50 people showed up for the written test.Out of them 10 qualified for the lab test. There were 30 objective questions for the written test and 3 questions for the lab test.Lab test was relatively easier as compared to last year.

Questions for Written Test
Questions for Lab Test

Shakthi Kannan and Kiran Divekar judged the lab test. Shakthi also helped me with the lab to setup the lab and answer the questions raised by participants. The lab test was for 2 hours and judges went to everyone’s desk in the last half hour to look at their programs.

We had the prize distribution at 2 PM. Apart form me,Vivek and Ritesh were present at the time of prize distribution. Vivek briefed the participants and others about STEC and its India Operation. Judges then distributed the prizes to winners and participant certificate to all participants.

Apart from organizing the programming contest I gave a talk on btrfs which I gave on FUDCon last year as well. Surprisingly the auditorium was full. There were lots of students so I spent most of the time in explaining concepts like file-system, COW, snapshots etc.

I did not get the chance to attend to other talks as programming contest kept me busy. Though in Lunch time I got time meet few my friends from FOSS community. We observed that participation in Gnunify is getting decreased from last couple of years. This might be happening because now we also very technology specific workshops/events and now people want to attend them. There were also discussion that we should now come with different approach to oraganize Gnunify. Lets see how things shape up in near future.

Long live GNUnify!!!