Creators(x) Spotlight: Mirdul Swarup – Building in the Open

By Mirdul Swarup, Manager, Developer Relations at Vultr

This article is part of Vultr’s Creators(x) series, where we sit down with thought leaders, builders, and innovators across the technology industry to explore their perspectives, their work, and what the future of technology means to them.

My journey at Vultr has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I’ve worn different hats across developer relations, content, community, hackathons, and open source, and I’m still figuring out what the next one might look like.

That uncertainty used to feel like something I needed to solve. Now, I think it’s one of the things I value most about my career. Each role has given me a different way of looking at technology and, more importantly, at the people who build it.

One of the things I’m most excited about right now is the work I get to do behind the scenes in the open source ecosystem.

Through various initiatives and collaborations, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside developers, maintainers, researchers, and companies building foundational pieces of today’s AI ecosystem. Being around these people has given me a very different perspective on how technology actually gets built.

The AI story isn’t being written by a handful of companies working in isolation. It’s being built through layers of collaboration, experimentation, and iteration. A model leads to a framework. A framework leads to a tool. A tool gives a developer an idea. That idea becomes a project that attracts a community and contributes improvements that someone else eventually builds on.

Someone writes the documentation. Someone opens an issue. Someone submits a pull request. Someone spends a weekend experimenting with an idea that seemed a little strange at first. Someone else takes that experiment and turns it into something useful.

That’s the part of technology I find fascinating: the unexpected paths things take once you give people the ability to build on each other’s work.

And communities are what make that possible.

Open source isn’t just about making code available. At its best, it’s a way for knowledge, ideas, and experimentation to move beyond the boundaries of any one organization. It creates spaces where people with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can contribute to the same body of work. The result is often more interesting than anything a single person could have built alone.

I’ve also come to appreciate how much my interests outside of technology influence my approach to this work. I spend a lot of time reading philosophy, particularly ideas from people who lived in completely different circumstances and saw the world in radically different ways.

That has made me increasingly interested in perspective itself. There is rarely a single way to look at a problem, and the best ideas often come from understanding why someone else sees it differently in the first place.

That applies to technology, too.

The more time I spend around developers and open source communities, the more I’m reminded that building technology is ultimately a human endeavor. The infrastructure matters. The models matter. The code matters. But so do the people deciding what to build, the communities forming around it, and the conversations that shape where it goes next.

That’s probably what I enjoy most about where I am today: being somewhere at the intersection of infrastructure, AI, open source, and communities, while constantly learning from people who see the world differently.

I don’t have a perfectly mapped-out career path, and I’m okay with that.

I’ve learned that the most interesting opportunities aren’t always the ones you can predict. Sometimes they come from saying yes to a project outside your job description, meeting someone through a community, getting curious about a technology you don’t fully understand yet, or simply being willing to put on another hat and see where it takes you.

So for now, I’m excited to keep building, collaborating, reading, and learning.

And, inevitably, keep picking up new hats along the way.

Want to hear more from Mirdul? In this Creators(x) conversation, Mirdul shares how he grew Vultr’s documentation from hundreds to thousands of resources, helped build a global DevRel community, and uses his work with Rotary International to bring AI education to underserved students across India.

Watch the full conversation to hear how documentation, developer communities, and education can open doors to new opportunities.