About me

Rahul Jha

I am a sophomore at Zakir Husain College of Engineering and Technology, studying Electronics Engineering. I advocate the principles of FLOSS (Free and Libre Open Source Software) and therefore, along with some seniors, I co-founded an open source software society at college, AMU-OSS with the aim of bringing more and more people to contribute to upstream software. I am afraid of the risks that online surveillance poses on us and thereby commend safe surfing of the Internet, i.e. at the very least using duckduckgo for search, using torBrowser, etc.

Hobbies

• Robotics

  I took up Engineering because of my passion for Autonomous Robots - They fascinate me, leave me overwhelmed every time I realise the complicated intricacies of machinery which empowers our brain.

• Working on Open Source Projects

  Other than learning/pondering about Robots, I help maintain vulture, a tool which helps find dead code in Python Programs, and coala, a language independent static analysis tool and a linter. I was selected as a Google Summer of Code student with coala twice in 2017 and in 2018, which was indeed a great experience. I believe that pursuing open source is one of the best ways I can give back to the society, teaching what I learned from it. If you too feel like that you need some help regarding how to get started with contributing to open source software, write to me straight away at (rahul [AT] rj722 [DOT] tech)

• Reading

  I like to learn new things and that is why I read, a lot about tech and yet more about the open source movement. I also like poetry and plan to start reading literature soon.

• Not using (i.e. not getting used) by facebook

  I didn't appreciate facebook back when I was a kid, particularly because of it's addicting nature and how I ended up reading jokes or laughing at someone else's very old pics. It appeared to be a huge waste of time so I stopped using it.

  As a grown up, I don't like it either, but for a very different reason - The amount of information they track (without my consent) is huge and I believe that this (subconsciously) changes my behavior online, which is certainly not acceptable nor preferable. I am particularly pointing towards Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Google. My facebook account is a fallback one - I use it only when I have to lookup an event or in case of an emergency where I need someone's contact information immediately.

  Please refer to https://stallman.org/facebook.html for more reasons on not using (getting used by) facebook.

• Going to meetups and conferences

  I've a lot of fun at conferences - whether I am an attendee or an organizer, either way I get to meet and learn from like minded people. I also host regular meetups through AMU-OSS, where anyone from the audience is welcome to come and speak about whatever she's been working on lately.

  I was invited as a speaker in PyCon India 2017 where I spoke about "Reducing Dead Code Ratio of Python Projects using vulture". I also delivered a lightening talk on "coala - What, why and How?", met quite a few celebrities in the Python community and made a lot of friends during the same conference.

Some of my other hobbies include:

• Writing - I update this blog once in a while. I write in my diary, much more often.
• Configuring and trying out different themes and desktop environments.
• Gtypist - Learning to touch type

Skilled at following