I have been talking at conferences/meetups/universities since the start of my career. And I frequently get invitations from universities in India to give talk about my work. I no longer take Linux Kernel workshops (all the material including slides can be found here and I aim to keep improving it) at universities but instead I’ve two talks to offer to university students this year. As I really believe in the power of open source community and ecosystem because of how it improves individual’s view towards learning, one of my personal goal for 2018 is to spread the idea of open source education in tier-2 cities/towns of India. So, if your university/college is from one such cities/towns then you’ll be given a preference.

Below are the details of the talks I’m offering to university students this year:


1. So you think System Programming is not a buzzword anymore?

I care a lot learning about the systems, mainly because of 2 reasons: it’s fun and it makes me feel closer to both hardware and software. I’ve spent lot of my time experimenting with systems and system programming as a Linux Kernel engineer and outside of my capacity as a kernel engineer too. Systems work normally includes kernels, compilers, linkers, debuggers, runtime libraries, class-loaders, dynamic analyzers, and tons of other bits of esoterica. In my experience of speaking at universities or with young talent, I’ve seen that lot of young students don’t find system programming interesting mainly because they think that it’s hard. This talk aims at proving that myth wrong. The talk will include everything I love about system programming, Linux Kernel and how tinkering around systems helps you to understand computers in a more organized way.

2. Building Career in Open Source

Nowadays when almost all major companies are using, supporting and contributing to the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), there are lots of jobs available for the people with FOSS background. As a paid, full-time FOSS contributor I have built my career by contributing to one of the biggest open source project - Linux Kernel. In this talk, I aim to talk about giving an overview of valuable ways to contribute and how they relate to building a career in FOSS. I will also focus on some of the benefits of working in open source communities which are beyond money, including [but not limited to] how it leads to opportunities like open learning, travel & collaboration with different people around the world and joy of working on big and interesting FOSS projects.

So, if you are a university student and are interested in inviting me to speak at your university then you can email me at me@vaishalithakkar.in. Note that currently I'm booking slots for the July, August and September month.

Cheers!

Update (May 9, 2018):

For the transparency and to save our time, here are few points you(student or authorised university person) need to consider before inviting me to give a talk at your university.

  • I do not charge any fees for giving talks at universities in India. Often universities/tech fests have budget for speakers, so if you have it and you feel that I should be getting paid for that, please donate it to Outreachy.

  • As I don’t have any travel sponsors, if giving a talk at your university requires me to travel from my current location (mostly Bangalore), you’ll need to sponsor my trip and onsite expenses.

  • I am not a big fan of speaker gifts like memento or t-shirts or flowers. But I do appreciate the love behind it. So, if you want to give me anything as a speaker gift, you can check my amazon book wishlist. (Note that this is not mandatory and this point is just to avoid collecting the things I already have)