Anand Chowdhary

I use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) both for my personal and professional life, and I made an open source project with which people can track their progress using git. It automatically generates a summary README and JSON API using a master JSON file where you update your OKR progress.

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