Speakers
Description
Most open source talks start with a GSoC acceptance or a big first PR. Mine doesn't — this is about what happens before that, when you're a final-year engineering student who has never contributed to a real open source project, but has spent hours inside one without realizing it.
While building an e-commerce sales analytics project — cleaning messy transaction data, visualizing revenue trends, and training a regression model to predict order values — I relied entirely on open source tools: pandas, scikit-learn, matplotlib, and Flask. At the time, I thought of them as just "libraries." It was only while preparing for this conference that I actually looked at how these projects are built, documented, and maintained by contributors — and realized how much I'd been quietly depending on a community I'd never engaged with.
In this talk, I'll walk through my project as a lens to talk honestly about that gap: the difference between using open source and being part of open source, why that gap feels intimidating for students like me, and what concrete first steps I'm now taking — reading contribution guidelines, picking up small documentation issues, understanding how maintainers review PRs — to actually cross it.
This talk isn't about expertise. It's for the many students in the room who've built real projects on open source foundations but have never made their first contribution, and don't quite know where to start.
Session author's bio
Simran Verma is a final-year engineering student passionate about data science and machine learning. She has built multiple projects using open source Python tools including pandas, scikit-learn, and Flask. Currently exploring first steps into contributing to open source projects.
Sheetal Upadhyay is a final-year engineering student with a strong interest in machine learning. She has been exploring ML concepts and tools alongside Simran, and is now taking her first steps into understanding how open source communities work.
Utkarsh is a final-year engineering student with a strong interest in machine learning. He has been exploring ML concepts and tools alongside Simran and Sheetal, and is now taking his first steps into understanding how open source communities work.
| In Person Attendance | In-person |
|---|---|
| Level of Difficulty | Beginner |
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