JJ Asghar on AI, ethics, and evening plans

This is the second in our series of informal chats with long-time Texas Linux Fest participants. We’d call them “friends of TXLF” but that might imply that there are folks out there who aren’t considered friends, and we know that just isn’t the case. Regardless, if you missed the previous interview, you can find it here.

JJ Asghar works in developer advocacy at IBM, covering a wide swath of software projects and communities. He’s been an enthusiastic supporter of Texas Linux Fest along the way, so I wanted to ask him about what being at the event means to people who live and breathe open-source Monday-through-Friday, 9-to-5.

But I had to start with the obvious, which is that the two of us met by sheer coincidence at an airport by spotting our FOSS event paraphernalia.

Interview

Nate: “I remember we first met kind of randomly, then have crossed paths a few times since, but never really hung out … so I don’t actually think I know what your job is.”

JJ: “I came in as a developer advocate about seven years ago, when developer advocacy was really, really important to so many companies. Because they wanted to hit the ground running, they leveraged my skill set and my connections to basically get IBM to tables that it normally couldn’t get to. ‘JJ, go be yourself and make IBM look good’ — that’s basically what I was told to do.

Over time, my job has morphed from that. I own our github.com, basically. It’s handwavy, not official, but for all open source when IBM open sources something, I am one of the gatekeepers before it leaves, if you will. Basically I’m the funnel.”

Nate: “That sounds like ‘a lot of different teams’ to me and, I’m assuming, they maybe don’t all know each other.”

JJ: “One hundred percent. I become air traffic control, because I know anyone from the CISO suite for security incidents to the kernel developers over in the z space. I need to be able to find opportunities for companies or people who completely don’t know each other realize that they’re actually trying to solve the exact same problem.”

Nate: “For a company like that, with that many things cooking, what’s useful about a community event?”

JJ: “One of the things we do that competitors don’t do is we show up day-in and day-out. We don’t yell it from the mountain tops. I’m coming in as a speaker who’s just going to show you some cool s***. I find it’s where I’m empowered to go explore in these spaces and give back to the community that has helped me so much.”

Nate: “About that community, do you remember when you first heard about Texas Linux Fest?”

JJ: “All the way back in my Chef days; that was when I started going to events. Before I was at Chef, I was at a couple of startups in Austin, but I didn’t spend a lot of time in the meetup space. But I knew of Texas Linux Fest, and I always aspired to speak there, because at the time I was training myself through the skill sets that I needed to build my career.

Texas Linux Fest was a pinnacle event for the communities I was in. The first version of Linux that really stuck with me was a version called Crux. It was the only one I could get working on my desktop at the time. It’s a really stripped down version of Linux. The package management system is done with a BSD style port tree. So all the installation process you can see is basically a Bash script: you can actually see how everything is done and you really learn how to build things from scratch and all that. I came up through that path. I took the hard mode; what can I say?”

Nate: “I want to ask you about your talk, Using Open Source AI and Linux to help Medical School Students. What’s PETE?”

JJ: “So doctors have really s****y bedside manner. It turns out, if you didn’t know, that doctors only get one class in medical school to learn bedside manner. And what they do is hire actors to come in and act, and you get to interact with them. But this is one class, out of multiple years of becoming a doctor.

What I did with PETE is I built a really simple front end to an AI model that gives different situations. PETE tries to emulate those things, so doctors can practice. It’s through text right now, but it’s a proof of concept. And it’s all local on your laptop. You can do it on a plane if you need to.

The best part is, it can grow, right?. Like, you can easily pull in a RAG of specific health issues that you are looking for. I actually have a medical school in the Bay Area that has put this in front of some of their students. Of course, it’s a first pass and it’s not great by any standard, but it’s enough for them to realize ‘oh wow; I can actually work with this and I can get the engagement that I’m looking for.’”

Nate: “So what led you down this path? What was the inciting incident to do it? Because you’re not a doctor, right?”

JJ: “No… I’m barely a college graduate! Actually, IBM is a really large company. We have a lot of fingers in a lot of different pies. And one of the marketing people, her sister-in-law is a dean for a medical school. They were just literally talking over dinner one day saying how crappy this situation is. And she was the marketer for Granite, which is the open source model we’re doing. And she’s like, ‘You know what? I bet I could find someone to figure out how to do this.’

And literally one Slack message later, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah; sure. I’ll make this happen.’ I coded it out over a couple of weeks to the point where I was able to actually bring in students.”

Nate: “Another thing that I noticed in your abstract was you mention the ethical perspective; building trust and stuff like that. I know, and you probably know too, there’s a lot of people in the broader open-source world who feel very irritated at the AI hype these days. And a lot of that — I think — is because they perceive this ethical disconnect where, for example, companies are scraping open source code and then not sharing what they have derived from that.

How would you frame this work in terms of those ethical questions for people who may come in with a little trepidation or concern?”

JJ: “Yeah; absolutely 100 percent. Rolling it back to my introduction, I work for IBM; what we’ve done is our models admittedly aren’t the best compared to the proprietary ones out there. But I can give you the full data set, all the weights, and the papers on how the models were created.

And we have the lawyers that are going to go to court with you to back you up to say that all the code inside of the model is attributed correctly. We will put our lawyers in court with you to say that we absolutely agree that this is completely valid open-source work that our data sets are.”

Nate: “There’s the headline for you: free lawyers!”

JJ: “Exactly! But in all seriousness, the challenge is — and this boils down back down to the same conversation we’ve been having for the last 20 years about proprietary versus open source — the proprietary ones are frankly better, but they’re also Napster, right? They’re also stealing all of this information from everybody. We’re actually trying to build iTunes, right? Not the marketplace aspect of it, but the idea that there are protections inside of it, and you can actually be legal in this space.”

Nate: “What should somebody bring into your talk? Are you going to need to know some baseline stuff?”

JJ: “What I’ve learned going through this ecosystem is there’s a lot of people who have preconceived notions of AI and how it all works. So I actually start at the very beginning and I kind of give a nice overview of everything and then bring it up to PETE.

So, you can come in with no knowledge whatsoever. Or you can be a data scientist. I’m telling you the story on how to get to this thing, then showing you the art of the possible. And I have a couple other projects if we get through too quickly.”

Nate: “What else are you looking forward to this year at Texas Linux Fest? Has anything really stuck out to you?”

JJ: “I have a handful of friends who are going to be there. So I’m very, very excited to come back. One of the best things about Texas Linux Fest is that it’s a yearly summer camp for me, in a lot of ways, where I get to see people I don’t get to normally see on the road or whatever.

I do love these-style events more than the big flashy conferences that I have the privilege of going to, because the people who show up at these are so much more genuine and they actually are passionate about ’the thing’ and I can sit there and spend 45 minutes talking about my Vim bindings.

And the best part, too, is it’s more-or-less right down the street from my house now, which is really, really fun. So, I’m excited.”

Nate: “I’ve never had a conference where I slept in my own house and drove there in the morning. How is that different? Does it feel like you’re not at a conference? Or does it feel like people are coming to visit you, or what?”

JJ: “It is a weird paradigm shift. I’ve done this a handful of times throughout my career. And I’ll tell you, as I’ve grown older … I have two daughters. I’m a girl dad. And my girls have obviously grown as I’ve done this career, I guess. And it’s interesting to see, as they’ve gotten older, the dad feelings of me wanting to come home early is actually much stronger.

If I go to an event here in town and I just drive and I sleep in my own bed and I leave again and my girls are young, they just go to school and, you know, it’s not a big thing. It’s like hanging out with your buds, right?

As I’ve gotten older and they start doing more activities or things like softball, for instance, I have to choose. Like, ‘oh, she’s going to go to the batting cages at 6 PM.’ Okay. Well, I need to be there to because I help coach her, right? I need to be there so I show that my priority is my daughter.”

Nate: “That is a really good point. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone articulate that before, about the value of a local community event. Or, maybe, we focus on ‘people who can’t travel around the country’ just for budgetary or time reasons. But yeah, you get your keep your life rolling too.”

JJ: “Exactly. I get to be the nerd during the day and then, in the evening, admittedly I don’t get to hang out at the bar and get into real, real deep nerdy stuff. But I get to be the dad at night.”

Nate: “That’s pretty nice. Is there anything else you’d like to say about what the experience will be this weekend?”

JJ: “Honest truth? Texas Linux Fest is really high up there on my charts of places to go.” [points behind him] “You won’t be showing this, but those are the ones I’ve spoken at, and Texas Linux Fest is always one I submit to.”

Nate: “JJ’s pointing at a whole bunch of lanyards over his houlder. Maybe we’ll make that the interview screenshot, if that’s okay with you.”

JJ: “Absolutely. I have so many friends and colleagues from there and I feel genuinely privileged to be part of your community.”

You can hear JJ's exploration of open-source AI, its ethical dimensions, and working with medical students at Texas Linux Fest 2025, October 3 to 4. But we all have to promise not to keep him out too late.