It’s been quite a while since my last post. The last weeks of GSoC saw me travelling to Hyderabad for the start of the new semester, and working from there. It was quite the push to add in the last few commits before the GSoC period ended. So I didn’t get any time to post updates. GSoC ended with August, and I was quite happy with what I’d been able to accomplish in three months of coding. True, I’d deviated from my original project description of working on the gdbserver, and focused more on the gdb client, but that was what the community was more interested in anyway.
And now to the even more fun part. Right near the end of GSoC, xvilka asked us in the radare2 GSoC chat if we’d be interested in coming to r2con (September 6th to 9th) to speak about our experience. They’d be reimbursing us for up to €1000 on travel and accommodation. And of course, I was in. Fast forward weeks of frustration with getting my Visa (I ended up getting my Visa the evening before I left from Hyderabad, how close was that!), and I was boarding a flight, delayed by an hour, to Frankfurt. With a connecting flight to Barcelona which I was afraid I was going to miss.
Looking down at Frankfurt, it was quite beautifully green. And the airport was HUGE. I spent what seemed like hours walking from my arrival gate to the one where I was supposed to board the next flight, all the while looking at my watch, praying I didn’t miss it. And I didn’t. I was really impressed by how clean and well organized Frankfurt’s airport was, despite its size.
By the way, this was my first time travelling outside India on my own. My only other previous trip was to the United States, with my parents and younger brother. So yeah I was super paranoid, and was looking at everyone around as an armed bandit who’s out to steal my money.
Arriving at Barcelona, I took the bus to Universitat de Barcelona. From there, I decided to walk. My AirBnB host had asked me to act as if I were a local, and if asked, say that I was his friend from India who’d come to visit. So I walked to his place near Metro Tetuan, had lunch at a nearby bistro, and got on the metro for a very minimal self-paced tour of the city.
r2con started the next day, with two days of workshops at Universitat de Barcelona. It was great to finally meet people who I’d been talking to for so long, like xvilka, Maijin, jvoisin, fellow GSoC students xarkes and Ren, and of course the pancake. On the first day, the introductory workshop was over-full, so xvilka and jvoisin had to take up a parallel workshop in another room, without any preparation. They did pretty well, I’d say. The second day I spent most of my time in the r2 hackathon, though I wish I’d attended the microcontrollers workshop by dark_k3y, which I’ve heard was awesome. Also spent a lot of time eating out with these guys, and it was really cool to get to know them better, and also try out so much new food.
The third and fourth days were dedicated to talks in the MediaPro building, and the conference hall was really intimidating when I first saw it. The GSoC talks happened in the afternoon, and we all had to use xarkes’ laptop so as to avoid problems with switching the HDMI cable too often. Still, it worked out quite well. Among the (lots of) other talks, pancake talked about ‘Hidden Gems in r2land’ which was both fun and instructive, mrmacete’s talk on r2frida was quite interesting too, and so was the talk about zdbg (debugging the Windows kernel with r2 and gdb). However by far the most entertaining were the two talks by Nighterman, one about the r2 badge and the other about debugging the Linux kernel with r2 and gdb (where he mentioned me, yay!).
And then that was it. I boarded the 6 am flight next morning to Zurich, and then on to Mumbai. Back to real life. Well I must say that even after an amazing trip, the best moment of the whole of it was when I felt the aircraft touch down in Mumbai. There’s nothing that feels quite like coming back home.
And well, that’s a wrap on the GSoC ‘17 chapter. I plan to continue working on radare2 (I’ve already sent in maybe 3 pull requests since), though I have admittedly slowed down because of college stuff. And about that, I’ll probably be talking about what I’ve been up to in college in the next post. So yeah, that’s it for now.