Meet Basil Kurian - 2nd place in TurnKey's first community development contest

Last week we finally published our interview with Adrian Moya, who won first place in the TurnKey community development contest. Basil won the respectable 2nd place and though we didn't know it at the same, more of his contributions would make it into the TurnKey library when we more than doubled it in the TurnKey 12 release. Today, we have nine TurnKey appliances originally based (or at least inspired) by Basil's contest contributions: ASP .NET on Apache with Mod_Mono, vTiger, PrestaShop, SugarCRM, StatusNET, OrangeHRM, Vanilla, Typo and the Nginx FastCGI development stack. We didn't deliberately prefer to adopt more of Basil's contributions over Adrian's, we just discovered it was more practical, for various arcane technical reasons, to include them in the TurnKey 12 release.

Hopefully by the next release we'll have even more official TurnKey appliances based on Basil and Adrian's contributions and even more importantly a fully open development infrastructure which should make it much easier for us to accept future community contributions.

Without further commentary, allow me to introduce you to Basil:

1. Who are you and what do you do?

   I'm Basil, a 24 years old Indian. I'm currently working as Site Reliability Engineer in Zynga Games. I started using Linux some 5 years back. I got inspiration to start using Linux from a Linux community in Orkut . I first joined community by criticizing Linux and related technologies and ideas. The members in that community came up with valid points and comments, that helped me to understand things in unix world. During my college days I used to attend Bash scripting and Linux troubleshooting contests at nearby colleges. I have a personal wiki in which I used to note down things that might be useful to others and to me at a later time. Check it out when you get a chance:

   http://wiki.unixh4cks.com

   My twitter handle : https://twitter.com/_Bas1L

2. How did you hear about TurnKey Linux?

   I used to read articles on Slashdot, Distrowatch like sites. I first heard about Turnkey Linux from Linux.softpedia.com . I 'followed' the twitter profile of Turnkey Linux. One day I saw the tweet about the TKLPatch and appliance creation contest. First I didn't understand much. When I looked at the log of IRC session by Liraz and Alon, I got some idea.

3. Is this your first time contributing to an open source project?

   Yes . Though I used to advocate free and open source softwares among my friends and colleagues, I haven't taken any effort on projects either because of lack of technical know how or because of the ignorance of the way by which I can contribute to an open source project. I was familiar with many open source CMS es. TKLPatch appears more interesting for me.

4. What were the main challenges in getting involved with the project?

   Main challenge was Internet bandwidth. My Internet connection was not an unlimited one then.

5. What did you learn that surprised you the most?

   The way shell scripts automate tasks in Unix based systems surprised me very much since from the beginning. I normally try to automate many of my routine tasks using shell scripts. I'm not much experienced in writing scripts. I can't do rocket science things, but I can just automate simple operations in the way I need.

6. What are your plans for the future?

   These days I'm trying to learn Python. I believe, That will help me to move to a devops career. Also I'm interested in Redhat certifications. I'm preparing for some of them.