Open Source Build Night: Tacos, Code, and Cornhole

by Alamo Tech Collective community, open-source, meetup 18 attendees

On August 12th, we hosted Open Source Build Night at the Alamo Tech Collective. About 18 developers showed up to work on projects, eat tacos, and talk shop.

Developers working at tables in the ATC space

What We Worked On

The night wasn’t about one big group project - everyone brought their own work or jumped in on one of ATC’s open source projects:

Taco Price Index - Our Rails app for rating bean and cheese tacos around San Antonio. Yes, this is a real project. No, we’re not joking about its importance. Brandon spent the evening trying to figure out Rails deployment, having picked Rails specifically because none of us knew it.

SATxData - A Python/Flask dashboard pulling from San Antonio’s open data portal. Currently shows crime statistics (apparently embezzlement is down, so that’s good news). The plan is to expand beyond just crime data to include other city information.

River City Resources - A Grails-based disability resource directory for San Antonio that’s actually getting real usage. We put serious effort into WCAG compliance and accessibility.

View from above showing the full space with developers at work

Individual Projects

Beyond the ATC projects, folks brought their own work:

  • A custom rendering engine built from scratch with OpenGL
  • IoT toolkit development for ESP32 boards
  • Various client websites using Next.js, Django, and other frameworks
  • Someone was even maintaining a legacy VB6 application (yes, really)

One attendee, Corrina, presented her AI assistant project that helps with cybersecurity tasks - with both normal and “chaos mode” for more creative suggestions.

The Vibe

The format was simple: show up, grab some tacos from El Rodeo de Jalisco, and either work on your own project or contribute to one of ours. No presentations (except for a quick GitHub repo overview), no rigid structure - just developers doing what they do.

Cornhole game being played outside the ATC space

When people needed a break from staring at screens, we had cornhole set up outside. The Texas heat made it a quick game, but it was a nice way to step away from the keyboards for a bit.

Another cornhole action shot outside

Knowledge Sharing

Throughout the night, there were organic teaching moments - someone explaining the Haversine formula for calculating distances between GPS coordinates, discussions about deployment strategies, debates over JavaScript frameworks, and help with Git workflows for those new to open source contribution.

One interesting conversation touched on using Git for Linux system configuration management - not just code. Another covered the challenges of maintaining multiple client codebases across different tech stacks.

Developers collaborating at a table with laptops

Looking Forward

At the end of the night, there was discussion about what people wanted from future events. Some suggested working on a single project together, hackathon-style. Good news on that front - we’re planning a 48-hour hackathon called “The Bank Job.”

The Open Source Build Night will continue as a regular event. It’s a low-key way to contribute to open source, work on your own projects with other developers around, or just learn something new while eating tacos.

Join Us

If you’re interested in attending the next one, check our Meetup page for upcoming events and our GitHub for the projects we’re working on, or just show up with your laptop and whatever you’re building. We’re here most Tuesday evenings.

The only requirement? Be ready to debate the merits of bean and cheese tacos as a standardized baseline for taco rating systems. It’s surprisingly controversial.