Hi, I'm Ashwin Kumar Uppala.

Ashwin Kumar Uppala is the Developer Community Lead at Gradium, a company building voice AI models for text-to-speech and speech-to-text. He runs the developer programs, technical content, and community around teams shipping speech models in production.

Before Gradium, Ashwin was Head of Community at Devfolio, leading a community of 1M+ builders across Ethereum, AI, and open source. He designed the AWS Student Hackathon Grants program from scratch, co-organized Synthesis, the first hackathon judged by AI agents, with the Ethereum Foundation, led hackathon partnerships for ETHDenver with $1.1M in bounties, and organized ETHIndia and BlockTrain, the world's first blockchain hackathon on a train. Earlier, as a Program Manager at GitHub Education, he ran the GitHub Campus Experts, Octernships, and Field Experts programs, managing 280 Campus Experts and roughly 700 developer events a year across 40+ countries. He started out at Major League Hacking, where he helped grow the community from 250,000 to 500,000 developers.

Ashwin has participated in 62 hackathons and won 12 of them, and was recognized in the MLH Top 50. He has spoken at KubeCon, Open Source Summit, GitHub Constellation, Civo Navigate, DevRelCon, MLH HackCon, and FOSS United about building developer communities, hackathons, and developer relations.

Pronounced “aah-shh-win”. Introducing me on stage? Use the short bio below.