Bay Area Nix Meetup at UC Berkeley's Open Computing Facility - 2025-05-02

Events
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What: A Bay Area Nix meetup. Come to learn and hack, and meet fellow Nixers, or learn more about Nix if your’e curious! This event is kindly hosted by the Open Computing Facility (OCF) at their lab on UC Berkeley campus.

Where: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/docs/services/lab/

When: 2025-05-03T01:00:00Z

RSVP: This Google Form

Who: @lopter and I got in touch with UC Berkeley’s Open Computing Facility (OCF), a student organization that loves open source software.

I met with them last week and learned that they ported all their desktop PCs to NixOS last year, and are in the process of porting their servers to NixOS!

Joe Wang (their general manager) has kindly offered to host a meetup at their computer lab on UC Berkeley Campus. It’s open to the public, but please RSVP so we have a sense of how many people are coming.

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@jfly This is great.

FYI me and @Ron took over the Bay Area nix meetup group that became dormant and are relaunching it on Luma.

See here for details: Bay Area Nix/NixOS User Group · Events Calendar

To avoid fragmentation and to simply have more events what are your thoughts on:

  1. If you are interested in arranging regular events, want to join us as co-organizer and we can work together? or,
  2. Use our lu.ma page for this event, can add you as host so you have full control of rsvp list
  3. If you are not interested in either, happy to promote your event to our mailing list

Excited to see more Nix events, so thank you for taking the initiative. Hoping to attend either way.

Let me know how I can help.

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I’m “Bay Area” but Santa Cruz – a bit too far with me to make it back in time with kiddos.
I wish I could come. I wish you all a lot of fun!

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Yes, we’d like to make this a regular thing. We’re hoping to start by meeting once a month, and then see how things go from there. I hope the OCF likes us and we can keep hosting there. Timing is a bit weird with summer break coming up, though.

That sounds great. CC: @r33drichards who also has a lu.ma account where he was going to post this.

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@jfly

I’ve been trying to get in touch with @r33drichards since October so glad you tracked him down :joy:

Yes, venue hardest part, but I run other meetup groups so plan to run joint events and share event to have more options for location.

Also, FYI our Matrix group: You're invited to talk on Matrix

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Luma event page for this event: Nix Learn & Hack Night @ UC Berkeley · Luma

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Just got more details about how to get in tonight:

The OCF is in MLK Student Union (2495 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94720). To enter, you have to go through the main lobby by Bancroft Way, state that you are joining the NixOS meetup at the OCF, and get a visitor’s pass.

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Great turnout today! We had 30-something people. Thanks again to the OCF for sponsoring us.

  • @laksith19 demoed the ocf/nix, the repo where OCF manages its fleet of lab computers, and their kubernetes cluster.
  • @lopter demoed clan.
  • @dnr explained his project styx.
  • Many more conversations I wasn’t a part of!

It was a hard for people to get in the building. We’ll try to handle that better next time.

Please share any photos if you took them. I only took 2, and one was blurry :frowning:

PXL_20250503_033704685_preview
PXL_20250503_033704685_preview1920×1440 387 KB

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Yes, last night was so great, it gave me insomnia :zap: :flushed:…

It was super cool to meet the OCF, and the people who have provided you download mirrors for years, thank you for hosting!

After some initial presentation, we mangled for about 40 minutes, then regrouped. We got a gauge for what people were interested about or needed, and then split in different small groups with a more focused topic, after some time people started to rotate in different groups, and that worked out super well.

Looking forward to the next one :).

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