Jacob Tomlinson

In 2012 I created a GitHub account. I was at my first ever hackathon and in order to submit our project we had to publish our code to a public repository with an open source licence. I had used subversion a little but the whole concept of version control combined with a social platform felt exciting and new.

Fast forward to 2024 and I now spend every day on GitHub writing code, reviewing pull requests and steering open source projects at NVIDIA, one of the largest tech companies in the world at the centre of the data and AI revolution.

Over the last decade I’ve written and reviewed thousands of lines of open source code and built incredible relationships with people from all over the world in the open source community. Thanks to the collaborative nature of open source the code I’ve written is integrated into amazing projects and running in fascinating places.

In that time I’ve learned key technical, social and political skills that have made me effective in collaborating with total strangers and navigating complex relationships with other open source maintainers.

In this talk I’ll dive into how I’ve tried to make the most out of working on open source software and how it has been a powerful tool to shape my career. Hopefully you will find something useful there to apply to your own career.