Talks on Aldrin Jenson

Slides from my talks and workshops

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0400

These are the slides from talks, workshops and pitches I’ve given over the years. Some come with a longer write-up of the day, which is linked where there is one. The decks themselves live at slides.aldrinjenson.com.

This isn’t every talk I’ve given. There were more over the years whose slides I no longer have, or that didn’t have slides at all. These are the ones I kept.

Talks

Turning Ideas into Reality with GenAI
ICGAIFE 2.0, the Kerala government's International Conclave on GenAI and the Future of Education · Dec 2024
Lessons from building real projects with AI, and how anyone can turn an idea into something real with today's GenAI tools.
Introduction to Generative AI
GDSC Kerala WoW, Kochi · May 2024
A beginner-friendly tour of what generative AI is and what you can do with it.
Introduction to FOSS, and Why You Should Care
MEC.Conf 2023, Model Engineering College · Oct 2023
An hour on free and open source software, the four freedoms, and how to get started. Read the write-up.
Stable Diffusion 101: Getting Started with Open Source AI Image Generation
FOSS United Kochi · Aug 2023
How open source image generation works, and how to run it yourself.
MineDojo: Building Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge
Paper presentation, Model Engineering College · Mar 2023
A research paper on building AI agents in Minecraft. Very technical, so I balanced the math with memes and analogies. Read the write-up.

Workshops

Introduction to LLMs
FOSSMeet '24, NIT Calicut · Mar 2024
A six-hour, hands-on workshop on Large Language Models, with Kurian Benoy and Nithin Sabu. Read the write-up.
Let's Git It
FOSS MEC
A Git workshop with Gokulnath M. Prabhu, including a custom workflow for making your first pull request.
Firebase 101
Google Developer Student Club, MEC
A session on Firebase with Adithya.
Agile Workshop
IEDC tech team, MEC
Agile methodologies for a student tech team, made with help from Arti Bhatia.

Tech talks

Agentic Workflows
Apr 2024
LLM agents, multi-agent workflows, and the research behind why they work.
Ollama Experiments
Mar 2024
Getting every drop of GPU power out of a machine by running Ollama instances in parallel.
Software Freedom
A PechaKucha (20 slides, 20 seconds each) on software freedom, explained with a masala dosa.
Talisman 101
Talisman, an open source pre-commit hook that stops secrets from being committed to Git.

Pitches and hackathons

Re-thread Inc.
Hult Prize 2023
A used-clothes marketplace to fight fast fashion.
Memoraide
Mar 2023
A mobile app for people with memory issues, built with Nayana Vinod, Gokulnath and Sharat Jacob. Code on GitHub.
AquaHarvest
BeachHack 5
A platform to help new fish farmers get started. Won 2nd prize.
Anomaly Detection System
A pitch for a general-purpose system to detect anomalies in surveillance networks.
Oregano
Hult Prize MEC
Software to help organic farmers sell directly to wholesalers. Top 3 on campus.

Show and tell at NYU, and meeting Daniel Shiffman

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0400

In October 2026 I went to Processing Community Day at NYU’s ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) in Brooklyn. It’s a day of talks, workshops and demos from the creative-coding community around Processing and p5.js.

With Daniel Shiffman at ITP.

I spent the afternoon walking around the exhibitions, where people were showing interactive pieces built with code. One was a mirror made of small wooden tiles that tilt to follow whoever stands in front of it.

A mirror of wooden tiles reacting to a hand.

The exhibition hall had a whole row of these: laptops and screens running people’s sketches and projects, each with a little label next to it about the work.

Walking through the exhibitions.

Meeting Daniel Shiffman

A lot of what I know about creative coding I learned from Daniel Shiffman. He runs The Coding Train on YouTube, wrote The Nature of Code, and teaches at ITP. I used to watch his videos a lot when I was younger. When I met him, I told him it was great to finally see him in person, because I never expected to get to meet him and take a photo with him. He thanked me and was really warm about it, and he gave me some of his Coding Train stickers (the little choo-choo train).

I met him around the Intro to Open Source talk in the auditorium.

Intro to Open Source in the auditorium.

When we talked, he suggested I try building boids: Craig Reynolds’ flocking simulation, where each bird follows three simple rules (stay apart, line up, stay together), and a whole flock emerges from that.

My show and tell

In the evening there was an Open Projector slot, where anyone could plug in their laptop and show something. So I got up and showed some of the things I’ve built:

Flappy Bird that learns to play itself, built with ml5.js, a project I’d shared on Twitter a while back
Sophie, a voice-based shopping assistant that helps you explore and pick clothes
A smart voice dictation assistant that understands what you mean, not just what you say

Presenting at Open Projector.

My message to the room was simple: with LLMs, you can now build things that just weren’t possible for one person to build before. It was a good crowd, and it went well.

Building boids the same day

I didn’t want to wait to try Shiffman’s suggestion, so I built it right there at the event with Claude Code, and then kept going:

Boids: the flocking simulation, with sliders for each rule. You can click to add birds, or place obstacles they steer around.
Boids 3D: the same flock inside a 3D box you can rotate.
Rotating Circles: three rotating circles joined by lines, which weave into string-art patterns as you change their speeds.

Boids running on my laptop in the auditorium.

All three went into my sketches gallery that night, the first new sketches there since 2023.

The day ended with live performances, including a cellist playing next to visuals on the big screen.

Evening performances to close the day.

It felt like a loop closing. I learned creative coding from Shiffman’s videos years ago, and now I got to show my own work in his building and build something he suggested.

Speaking at Kerala's international conclave on GenAI and education

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0530

In December 2024 I spoke at ICGAIFE 2.0, the International Conclave on Generative AI and the Future of Education, in Trivandrum. It’s organised by IHRD (the Institute of Human Resources Development) under the Government of Kerala, and brings together educators, researchers and people building with AI.

My talk was “Turning Ideas into Reality with GenAI”: lessons from actually building projects with AI, and how anyone with an idea can now use these tools to turn it into something real.

The recording of my talk.

The slides are here.

A nice surprise afterwards: The Hindu’s coverage of the conclave mentioned me alongside speakers from IIT Bombay and IISc.

IHRD invited me back for the next edition in January 2026. I couldn’t make it from New York that time, but it meant a lot to be asked.

Representing Thoughtworks at GIDS 2024

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0400

We demoed multiple of our creations along with a Text to Song demo which impressed a lot of people including the CTO of Thoughtworks!

With the CTO Emerita of Thoughtworks

Met some great people IRL!

Experience sharing by a manager at Google about our booth and the Text to Song Demo!

Goodies and stuff!

https://developersummit.com/

Teaching a 6-hour LLM workshop at NIT Calicut

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0530

I got invited as a speaker to conduct a 6 hour Workshop on Large Language Models(LLMs) for FOSS Meet'24 at NIT Calicut in the end of March.

It was nice.

There was Kurian Benoy and Nithin Sabu as co-speakers to help as well.

Met some cool people over there as well.

The slides from the workshop are here.

Me, Kurian and Nitin Sabu. 3 xMEC-ians

With my trusty ol' Thinkpad

Cool friends I've come to know over the years.

Speaking at MEC.Conf 2023

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0400

This was one of the great memories!

I was invited to give a talk on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to an audience of around 150 people.

At first I was very hesitant. I gave the volunteers the contact number of a lot of other people. Still, in the end it came back to me due to multiple reasons. I spent days making a good presentation.

And it paid off! it paid off big time!!

This was one of the happiest moments. At the end of the talk, I got such great feedback that I was very proud and happy!

I talked about FOSS, the origins, the 4 freedoms, why one should care, how to get started etc. This was a topic that was very close to my heart. The slides are here.

Me showing how Open Source helped me build one of the most used project of mine - MEC Diffusion

With Iqbal and the organizing team

I was heavily inspired by a good friend Abraham Raji and a lot of very enthusiastic people from the FOSS community, because of which all the effort put into the talk felt very much worth it.

I used several real-life examples and analogies (the 4 Freedoms through a Masala Dosa example) to make the concepts much clearer and more relatable.