Faisal Ahmed Farooq

My name is Faisal Ahmed Farooq, and I'm a final year student at Presidency University, expecting to graduate this summer. I'm also currently working at Polkadex as a Junior Rust Engineer.

When the pandemic first struck India in March of 2020, I began my open source journey when I participated in the FOSSE fellowship, which stands for Free Open Source Software for Education, funded by the MHRD Department of India and under the guidance of professors from IIT Bombay. During this period, I learned several things from my fellow teammates and mentors, such as Docker, GitHub Actions, Nginx, Microservices, Netlist, React, Redux, etc., while building a front end for drawing circuit schematics and performing simulations. It required a steep learning curve which was very rewarding in the future.

Shortly after, I got into the MLH fellowship, wherein I worked on many open source projects in sprints of 3 weeks with themes varying from security to ethical collection of data. This period helped build my confidence in my preferred tech stack and gave me the experience of collaborating with folks in different time zones.

I was intrigued by Rust and decided to explore it over the next few months. I began to look for opportunities to further my skill set. I stumbled upon a Linux Foundation Mentorship project that solely involved Rust, wherein I had to create a low-level API in Rust for a user-space data plane written in C. This project led me to research current networking bottlenecks at the kernel level and how active projects such as eBPF and VPP are trying to solve them.

Currently, I work as a Junior Rust Engineer at Polkadex. I primarily use the substrate framework and continue to learn about the Polkadot ecosystem to learn more about parachains.