We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at J&B Family Restaurant in downtown Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Wednesday.

This is a supplementary informal meeting; we will still hold hybrid meetings for technical topics.

The restaurant is located at 79 Victoria St N in Kitchener, near the corner of Victoria and Duke. Here is a map. 

J. Lucas Donkers will tell us how he put together a remote garage door opener using Python, an Arduino and some LLM coding. He writes: 

I used free LLM's to help write the bulk of the code to create an interface between my smartphone and a spare garage door remote controller, which allows to me type in a PIN through my phone's browser to open the garage.  

Colin Knapp will share how programming with LLM assistants helped him stay functional while recovering from a health issue. 

Jason Paul will continue his exploration of setting up BigBlueButton using GitOps/DevOps principles.

Matteo Golin will discuss how he uses Free Software tool suites to make rockets. He writes: 

We are continuing the dinner meetup tradition at Yo Sushi in downtown Kitchener, starting at 7pm. Note that this restaurant meeting is on a Monday. 

This is a supplementary informal meeting; we will still hold hybrid meetings for technical topics.

Megan McDermott will tell us about Marp, the Markdown Presentation System. 

Christopher Thompson will relate some adventures (and misadventures) in working with his homelab setup. He will tell us some things that worked and some that very much didn't. 

Update 2: It looks like the weather will be quite snowy for Wednesday (2026-01-21) as well. We will not cancel the restaurant meetup, but please do not put your well-being at risk trying to attend. Exercise good judgment in deciding whether to attend given the snow.

Room Update: Unfortunately our usual in-person meeting room is unavailable. This month our meeting will be held in DC 2585 in the Davis Centre at the University of Waterloo. This is the same building as the Davis Centre Library, but on the second floor. The room is somewhat tricky to find, but on the second floor there are some floor maps posted that might help. Here are some directions: