After discussions with @Shree_Kumar, I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring.
About me:
Name: Ashutosh Pandey
Bio: I am a Compiler Engineer who has spent the last 7 years building various communities, meetups and the ecosystems to sustain them. I’ve been involved in 50+ Hackathons in some or the other capacity (participant, mentor, organizer, jury)
Location: Bangalore
Personal site/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashupdsce/ , https://x.com/ashpande18
Home community: LLVM Social Bangalore , Point Blank
Years of association with FOSS/digital commons: 7+ years (Point Blank), 5+ years (LLVM Bangalore).
About my work:
Some of the things I’ve been involved in:
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LLVM Social Bangalore: I co-organize LLVM Social Bangalore, a recurring meetup for compiler engineers, researchers, students, and PL enthusiasts. The community has grown from roughly 600 members to 3,500+ members, with 50+ events around LLVM, Clang, MLIR, GCC, compiler infrastructure, language tooling, and related systems topics. This is now the largest compiler meetup in the world.
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Making compiler tooling more accessible: Through LLVM Social, I helped organize and present a 10-talk “Introduction to Common Compiler Tools” series, which introduced 800+ developers to LLVM IR, Clang, opt, llvm-mc, and the broader compiler toolchain.
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IICT — Innovations in Compiler Technology: I helped build IICT as a dedicated India-focused workshop for compiler researchers, industry engineers, students, and open-source contributors. IICT started with 200+ attendees in 2024, grew to 380+ attendees at IISc in 2025, and I am serving as Chair of the Organizing Committee for IICT 2026.
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SEGFAULT Hackathon: I organized SEGFAULT, India’s first compiler-themed hackathon, co-located with IICT 2025. It brought together 48 teams and 100+ participants to build projects around compiler frameworks, domain-specific languages, program analysis, AI/ML compilers, and developer tooling. SEGFAULT will be returning at IICT 2026.
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IndiaFOSS Devrooms: I managed the Compilers, Programming Languages and Systems devroom at IndiaFOSS 2025 (India’s biggest F/OSS conference), curating talks that introduced a broader FOSS audience to open compiler/tooling work. The devroom is also returning for IndiaFOSS 2026.
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Point Blank: I founded Point Blank at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering in 2019. It started as a student tech community and has grown into a strong pipeline for open-source, hackathons, systems work, and peer-led mentorship. Members and alumni have contributed to several open-source ecosystems and regularly volunteer at IndiaFOSS, Rust India, IICT, LLVM Social Bangalore, and other technical communities. Point Blank is now nominated for Student community of the year at IndiaFOSS awards 2026.
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Student open-source pipeline: Through Point Blank, we’ve helped students move from “I don’t know where to start” to contributing to real open-source projects. The community has produced GSoC 36 contributors, mentors, 90 SIH winners, ICPC regionalists, and engineers who have gone on to work at companies including AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Visa, and others. Combined, Point Blank mentees have produced 1100+ Pull requests across 178 projects!
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Talks and workshops: I’ve delivered talks and workshops on FOSS, systems, compiler tooling, and how to get started in low-level engineering at venues including FOSS Talks 4.0, IIT Hyderabad, CDAC SuperComputingIndia 2025, IndiaFOSS, LLVM Social Bangalore, and other community spaces.
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Hackathons and SIH: I’ve been involved with hackathons as a participant, organizer, mentor, and judge. I have served as a Smart India Hackathon evaluator and mentor, including evaluating hundreds of ideas and serving as one of the AICTE mentors for SIH 2025. I have also judged or mentored events such as Sandbox, Aventus, Hackman, CentuRITon, HackColossus, Zenith, and others.
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Social media outreach: Through LinkedIn, I regularly share opportunities, events, technical resources, student guidance, and thoughts on compilers, FOSS, systems engineering, and community building. The goal is to make deep technical fields feel less intimidating and more reachable for Indian students and early-career engineers. I received the Top Voice badge on LinkedIn and have 21,000 followers.
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Fun OCAML 2027 : Working with Prof. KC Sivaramakrishnan from IIT Madras to organize FunCAML OCaml event in Bangalore, India. I am also closely working with him on his Functional Programming Launchpad initiative, which is a center at IITM.
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ACM SIGPLAN INDIA Chapter : I am one of the initial 15 members of this chapter, which will oversee compiler education and outreach across the country.
My FOSS/digital commons journey: Like many others, my FOSS journey began with Google Summer of Code. I was a mentee with Arduino in 2020 where I worked on transpiling C/C++ (Arduino) code to Micropython. My other experiences include being a Linux Foundation Mentee with ELISA (Intel Mobileye) where I worked on enabling code coverage for the GNU C Library for ISO 26262 standards. I interned at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and also for Element14 (Open Source Hardware). Since 2021, I’ve been working with the Compiler team at AMD, which upstreams code to the LLVM and GCC compiler infrastructures.
How and when I came across the FOSS United community: I gave a talk at IndiaFOSS 2024 : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wegPULgNDWI](https://LLVM Bangalore @ IndiaFOSS, Scaling a niche community to 2100 members and beyond!)
Why I am running for the Governing Board: I believe FOSS United has immense potential to reach every single university in India and help students build the next generation of digital commons. My experience with building similar communities at scale could be of use to FOSS United.
Why would I be a good fit (What prior long-term volunteering experience do you have): Building and scaling Point Blank, LLVM Social Bangalore, Innovations in Compiler Technology Workshop and the SEGFAULT Hackathon has given me a good idea of the kind of problems FOSS United and IndiaFOSS have to tackle on a regular basis. Moreover, I’ve been involved with IndiaFOSS as a devroom manager since the last 2 years, and consequently know FOSS United leadership quite well already.
Things I would like to focus on as a GB member: Improving the Season of Commits programme, Improving the student clubs programme as well as FOSSHack. These three are where I feel I can contribute the most.
Optional: Anything else you’d like to share with the community. For instance, what impact or change do you want to bring about in the FOSS United or the Indian FOSS community?
I would like to introduce more people to the idea of FOSS contributions beyond code - running communities, advocacy, mentorship etc. All are meaningful ways to contribute to FOSS.