Sam Varghese
Friday, 05 December 2008 04:01
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
His interest in technology evolved from playing around with electronics and taking things apart at a young age. "Naturally this led me to computing where, when I was about 12, I started to play around with HTML. It quickly took off there, making lots of little websites and eventually learning to program," he says.
"I learnt a lot of my skills and knowledge using phpBB - a popular, open source, bulletin board software - which I modified a lot and hacked on the code here and there. I started developing a content management system while I was at school which I hosted on sourceforge.net because I knew they hosted projects free.
"I picked a licence knowing little about it besides the fact that it lets you share your code and I had seen others use it. This licence turned out to be the GNU GPL.
"It wasn't long before I learnt what open source truly meant and I would never go back. FOSS is a technically superior way for building, maintaining and using software, regardless of whether your company is in IT or not. The community aspect is also very attractive in open source. I'm always meeting exciting and fun people, and having the opportunity to work alongside of, and collaborate with, some of the best programmers in the world is an honour."
His family isn't particularly into technology. "My brother used to dabble in computing, mainly networking and HTML - incidentally, he got me started - but he hasn't done anything besides word processing in a long time. Other than that, the rest of my family don't really show much interest in computing (although I have convinced some of them to use Linux!)."
Hesketh's biggest responsibility at the conference is the mini-conferences. These are held on the first two days of the five-day event; there are 11 in all, some running over two days, others just on one day.
"Primarily, I'm the miniconf liaison. I am in charge of making sure they go smoothly and actually happen," says Hesketh. "My philosophy is 'your miniconf, your show' so I am giving the miniconf organisers a lot of flexibility in what they do and how they do it.
"So far the organisers have been great and we hope to release their schedules very shortly. It should be exciting to see what they do with their conferences and I'm looking forward to attending."
