From Designing Posters to Finding Community
I got an opportunity to present a talk at UbuCon Asia 2026 held in conjunction with COSCUP on “Controlling Ubuntu with Local LLM” which I had co-prepared with Shivay Sharma.
I was previously part of the design team for UbuCon Asia 2024 in Jaipur, and this year I had the opportunity to contribute as a designer for UbuCon Asia 2026 as well. I had wanted to attend UbuCon Asia 2025 in Kathmandu, but personal commitments meant that I couldn’t make it.
So, when I arrived in Taipei, there was already a sense of familiarity. I had experienced UbuCon Asia in person before, as part of the design team for the 2024 edition in Jaipur. But this time felt different. Alongside contributing as a designer, I was attending the event as a participant and, eventually, stepping onto the stage as a speaker.
Coming from an industry that is largely closed, open source has always been particularly interesting to me. There is something fundamentally different about communities where people from different backgrounds can come together around shared interests and ideas.
UbuCon Asia and COSCUP gave me a chance to experience that firsthand.
Before the conference officially began, there was a pre-event welcome party. I arrived in Taipei on the same evening so I just went straight to the venue after checking in.
It was a great initiative because it gave everyone a chance to meet before the actual event started. Instead of walking into the conference the next morning and seeing a room full of unfamiliar faces, you already had people you could recognize, talk to, and catch up with.
For me, this was especially nice because I got to meet old friends again while also having conversations with people I had previously only known through online chat.
People you would rather see in chat rooms, meetings, or social media suddenly become people you’re sitting across from, talking about technology, communities, projects, and everything in between.
The welcome party made that transition much easier.
The Conference
The next morning, I headed to the venue at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), where UbuCon Asia was co-located with COSCUP. The venue was spread across 2 to 3 floors and had a lot happening at the same time for both the days—sessions, community booths, people moving between rooms, and different activities happening throughout the event.
The local team had put a great deal of effort into bringing the event together, and it was fascinating to see UbuCon Asia and COSCUP come together side by side.
Seeing names like Mozilla, VLC, Wiki Media alongside Ubuntu and so many other regional open-source communities was one of those small things that made the scale of the event sink in. I spent quite some time walking around the different booths, looking at what people were building, talking to people, and simply taking in the atmosphere.
There was something interesting about seeing so many different communities occupying the same space. Everyone had their own projects, interests, and backgrounds, but there was a common thread connecting all of them.
My Talk
Speaking at UbuCon Asia was a particularly meaningful part of the experience for me. This wasn’t just another presentation. I had contributed to UbuCon Asia as a designer before, and now I was going to stand on the other side of the event as a speaker.
My talk, Controlling Ubuntu with a Local LLM, was about exploring how a local language model can interact with Ubuntu through narrowly defined tools rather than being given unrestricted shell access. The approach uses local inference, limited tools, host-side validation, allowlists, confirmations, dry-runs, and auditing instead of trusting the model with arbitrary system access.
The workshop included demonstrations around disk usage, memory, systemd services, and, optionally, LXD. An important part of the demonstration was showing not only what the system could do, but also what it would refuse to do—for example, denying access to paths or containers that weren’t explicitly allowlisted.
What I enjoyed most wasn’t simply presenting the idea. It was the discussion that followed.
There were people who were genuinely interested in the approach, and some of them suggested ways in which the idea could be improved. We had interesting conversations about the possibilities, limitations, and practical considerations of running something like this locally.
My friend Shivay Sharma and I had started with an idea of how local AI could be used safely with Ubuntu, and getting feedback from people who were approaching the problem from different perspectives was extremely valuable.
It made the session feel less like me presenting an idea and more like the beginning of a conversation around it.
The sessions are obviously an important part of UbuCon Asia, but the conversations that happen between sessions can be just as valuable. That kind of interaction is one of the things that makes community events special.
Closing and the Team Dinner
As the event came to an end, there were closing remarks and a chance for everyone to come together one last time. The closing session was followed by the official dinner, which was a buffet with both vegetarian and non-vegetarian options.
After spending the event moving between sessions, booths, conversations, and other activities, sitting down for dinner was a nice way to slow down.
The food was great, but more importantly, it gave everyone some time to simply relax and talk.
After all the preparation and activity surrounding the event, it was nice to end the day together.
What I Took Away From UbuCon Asia 2026
I have been around open-source communities for some time, but UbuCon Asia 2026 made something feel much more real to me.
I’ve always understood the idea of open source as a concept. I’ve seen people collaborate online, build projects together, share knowledge, and contribute to things that are used by millions of people.
But seeing that community in person is different.
I met people from different countries, different age groups, and completely different backgrounds. People who grew up in different parts of the world, work in different fields, and have very different experiences were brought together by common interests, common hobbies, and things they genuinely believe in.
You can see pieces of that community online, but it is rare to experience the whole thing in person.
And that is probably what I’ll remember most about Taipei.
Not a particular session. Not a particular booth. Not even my own talk.
It is the people.
I’m genuinely grateful that I was selected as a speaker and got the opportunity to experience COSCUP & UbuCon Asia firsthand. Going from contributing as a designer to actually attending and speaking at the event made this UbuCon especially meaningful to me.
It also made me believe in open source a little more—not just as a way of building software, but as a way of bringing people together.
I hope to continue contributing to this community in the future, in whatever capacity I can.
Until the next UbuCon Asia!