Astoria Tech Meetup, late May
Astoria Tech Meetup goings-on. Within is a partial recap of last week's event, as well as links for you to RSVP for our hack session coming up this week.
We've had a lot going on in the Astoria Tech Meetup community recently. Below is a partial recap of an event from last week, as well as links for you to RSVP for our hack session coming up later this week.
Live development with LLMs on stage
At our monthly nighttime event last week, a few of us were given 15 minutes on stage to go from zero-to-thing using any AI/LLM developer tools to build.
For my 15 minutes of development, I used Val Town and Cursor. My path from bootstrapping to publishing during that time:
- Bootstrap a new val with Townie, Val Town's LLM bot
- Get the val in some sort of basic order with Townie
- Clone the val to my local with
vt, Val Town's new CLI - Refine the val in the comfort of my own local, using various models in Cursor
- See the val update live on the web using
vt watch
Here's a slightly cleaned up version of what I made:
- Subcurrent Shuffle (live val)
- Val source code
It was a super fun event. Hats off to OG Astoria Tech organizer Peter for arranging and devising a great night.
Hack timez this weekend
This week we've got even more stuff coming up, including a hack session on Saturday, May 31. If you're anywhere in striking distance of Astoria and you want to code with folks, build community projects, and just generally get inspired, this will be a great day. It's our third hack session of the year, and the last two have already produced some interesting projects.
For our hack sessions, we tend to specifically focus on building community projects. Our aim is to keep the hack sessions approachable for all levels while staying productive. (If you don't want to hack, that's ok! Come to our weekly coffee hangouts instead.)
You're not limited to building what we're already working on. Instead, you can bring your own idea if you like, and either build on it yourself (hi, I tend to do this) or rally other folks to jump in on your idea. At the same time, you certainly don't have to bring an idea. You can jump in on our ongoing projects. Someone will help get you up and running.
Our ongoing projects currently include:
- LocalMart: know what’s in stock at local Astoria shops so you can buy local without the goose chase
- Subcurrent: an RSS feed aggregator to spotlight authors and creators in the Astoria Tech Community
Subcurrent (which I've written about previously) is the app that Subcurrent Shuffle (which I mentioned above) is based on. If you come to the hack and want to work on Subcurrent, we'll get to work together.
Ok! Here are the places where you can RSVP for the hack:
Hope to see you there!