Anand Chowdhary

My startup Pabio was one of the first companies to be part of the GitHub Externship program, through my most popular project Upptime (8k+ stars). We hired 4 participants from the program as "externs" who worked with us all summer to develop Upptime v2 and Upptime CLI, launching soon. Apart from helping with the code, I provided mentorship and product support to the team.

On the 8th DDOG event, I gave a longer version of my talk from GitHub Satellite on Karuna 2020 and helping solve COVID-19 using GitHub Actions. In the talk, I took participants through building workflows for git scraping, how our Airtable and Pupeteer integrations work, and other popular open-source COVID-19 projects. Other speakers at the event were Suzanne Daniels (Spotify), and Sascha Klomp and Torben Knulst.

Vellore Institute of Technology's CodeChef-VIT invited me for an interview and Q&A session during their Hacktoberfest Meetup 2021. I spoke about getting started with open source, my first contributions, and how easy it is to get started. The video is available on CodeChef-VIT's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qLFXv6sVu4&t=1552s

As a startup founder and open source contributor, my interest lies on the intersection of tech entrepreneurship and FOSS. GitHub invited me speak at Nova on the topic "Open source as a startup", where I shared Pabio's journey building Upptime and my background in open source in this 30-min talk.

I was invited by Dr. Rainer Harms, Associate Professor, the Netherlands Institute for Knowledge-intensive Entrepreneurship (NIKOS), University of Twente to deliver a guest lecture on opportunity recognition. I have previously spoken on this topic twice at the UT, although I was (much) better prepared this time.

X is the annual technology event of my alma mater, The Mother's International School, hosted by their technology club MINET. I was the keynote speaker and remotly shared my story building a startup while I was in MINET and how I got where I am.

During the pandemic, I moved back to India and helped start Karuna 2020, a nonprofit that distributed meals to thousands of migrant laborers and masks to frontline workers. My team and I ended up building an open source platform on top of GitHub Actions to track donations, volunteers, distributions, etc. Richa Kumar (Senior Director of Software Engineering at GitHub) interviewed me about my journey founding Karuna 2020 and building these tools, and I spoke about how the open source community came together during the pandemic and built tools for accountability and information in this 30-min talk. The video is available on GitHub's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QF8tpEiYx8

As my first event of 2021, I was invited to judge DotSlash, a 30-hour virtual hackathon from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, India, and deliver a talk on Innovation & Entrepreneurship. The talk focused on my journey building startups from initial ideas, and tips on finding and seizing opportunities.

Staart is a full-stack framework written in TypeScript, to help build SaaS (software-as-a-service) apps. It includes all the required boilerplate, like users and authentication, teams and scopes, API keys and tracking, recurring billing, and more.

I was invited by was invited by Dr. Rainer Harms, Associate Professor, the Netherlands Institute for Knowledge-intensive Entrepreneurship (NIKOS), University of Twente, to deliver a guest lecture on Opportunity Recognition to students of Business Administration MSc in September 2020. I modified my usual talk to focus on my understand of opportunity recognition, with three key parts: (i) problems and tools, (ii) S³ (seek, screen, seize), and (iii) identifying opportunities by observing changes in consumer behaviors and the market. In the third week of November, the Global Entrepreneurship Week is celebrated, and the University of Twente invited me to deliver another guest lecture on Opportunity Recognition, this time to ~150 Business Administration BSc students.

Upptime is an uptime monitor and status page powered by GitHub Actions, Issues, and Pages. It has over 6,000 stars on GitHub, is the most popular open-source uptime monitor, and was featured on CSS Tricks and Hacker News.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was at home in New Delhi, India, and was invited by Dr. Rainer Harms, Associate Professor, the Netherlands Institute for Knowledge-intensive Entrepreneurship (NIKOS), University of Twente, to deliver a guest lecture on Opportunity Recognition. Since classes were remotely held over video conference, I delivered a 30-minute lecture and answers several questions about discovering new business opportunities. This talk was part of a series of lectures by industry professionals for the course "International Entrepreneurship — A Strategic Technology Perspective", part of the study program Business Administration MSc. International Entrepreneurship (201600011) is a 5-EC course offered to the tracks "Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Strategy" and "International Management and Consultancy" in the master's program. I modified my usual talk to focus on my understand of opportunity recognition, with three key parts: (i) problems and tools, (ii) S³ (seek, screen, seize), and (iii) identifying opportunities by observing changes in consumer behaviors and the market.

Supreme Incubator is a 6-month startup incubator consisting of a "comprehensive curriculum, along with meetings with dedicated mentors, investor lunches, and more". In August 2020, I was invited to mentor teams and judge startups based on their pitch for the program's virtual B-Plan Event. From 350+ registrations, 102 participants were selected to form 40 teams and work on their startup ideas. The teams participated in a "bidding war" where they selected three words to develop a business idea around, and then developed pitches for the same. In the first week, my role was limited to judging startups' pitches. Over the course of the next few weeks, I'll mentor selected startup ideas and help them build a viable business.

I was invited by Enactus, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, to be part of a panel discussion about "How failures are not [the] opposite of success, but a part of it". This talk was part of their CHANGEMAKER workshop to help students understand the importance of learning from failures. With me on the panel was Tarusha Mittal, Chief Operations Officer of OroPocket, a fintech company.

Uppload is a JavaScript image uploader and editor with no backend required.

OneUp is the startup accelerator, incubator, and student organization to support entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. As their first event of the academic year of Fall 2019, Startup Social, they invited me to deliver a keynote about building a startup as a student. My talk was an extended version of my NESST keynote, and explained my journey through highschool, founding Oswald Labs, moving to Enschede, and being at Santa Clara. There was also a 30 min question-answer session following the talk, which led to a fruitful discussion about challenges and opportunities students have when building a startup.

In September 2019, I spoke on web accessibility at Women Who Cloud 2019, the world's first developer conference focused on the latest in and the future of cloud-based technologies targeted towards female developers. My talk was a 35-minute tutorial on building more accessible websites and webapps, with code samples and research studies. I was also extremely humbled as one of the only four male speakers out of 29 total speakers. The talk was titled "Making your product accessible to everyone" and discussed three key parts -- web standards (such as the WCAG, including semantics, color contrast, etc.), user customization (like dark theme and reduced motion), and cloud & APIs (like generating alt text for user-generated content using deep learning APIs). It also included a short quiz about aria-label and demos for accessibility audits using Lighthouse and understanding the Accessibility Tree in Chrome. Overall, I tried to combine traditional web accessibility knowledge with the conference's focus on the cloud.