After an afternoon replete with good food, coconut juice, tropical heat and exhaustion, we went to the venue at NIT Calicut. As we waited for the microphones to be set up for the keynote, I had a chat with the soon-retiring professor who helped conceive FOSSMeet. He helped revive this edition of the conference after a three-year gap, and also had a part in the Free Software revolution in Kerala, which saw schools and government departments adopt Free Software...

Offline-first has several upsides, but the primary benefit is that the app is always snappy and responsive, so clinicians aren’t waiting for their app to talk to the cloud during patient interactions. In a busy clinic like Ravdeep’s, this is a crucial feature. In countries like India, Bangladesh, or Ethiopia where a patient encounter is often less than 5 minutes, every second counts and therefore every call to the server matters.

One year ago (in October 2018), we piloted the Simple app in five public health facilities in Punjab, India. The original process of teaching healthcare workers to use Simple in pilot hospitals involved in-person trainings over a week from members of our team. We’ve come a long way since then.

When I moved to Bangalore six years ago, I had no interest in India’s garbage management problem. I moved here to build a software company, not to muck about with garbage bins. But every time I would fly between the subcontinent and the Americas, I would find relief on my home continent and exhaustion on my continent of immigration.