Community

Kyoto Tech Meetup: 2025 wrap-up

Recapping what the Kyoto Tech Meetup has been up to in 2025.

Ash Ryan Arnwine

23 Dec 2025 — 2 min read

Photo by Alisa Anton / Unsplash

Today was our last Kyoto Tech Meetup event of the year!

As a quick recap, our first meetup was in September, and since then we've done 8 events:

6 Morning Tech & Coffee sessions
2 Community Hack Days

I want to say a massive thanks to everyone in the group. My original intent was to do 3–4 coffee sessions this year to see how things went. But the community nudged me to go ahead and start the Hack Days this year and make the coffee meetups weekly instead of monthly.

In terms of results, so far we've seen:

At least 1 person find a job through the meetup
At least 1 person go from "non-developer" status to shipping a web app
An official website for Kyoto Tech Meetup with multiple updates
A partnership with FabCafe Kyoto to provide space for our Hack Days
... and a ton of info sharing, projects built, and friendships created

I'm really happy with such an exciting start and I look forward to what we'll do together in 2026!

Dec 23 coffee session wrap-up

For today's session, here were some of the things we discussed.

Browser Automation & Scraping

Puppeteer
https://pptr.dev/
Headless Chrome automation for scraping, testing, and screenshots.
Playwright
https://playwright.dev/
Cross-browser automation (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) with strong testing and scraping support. I used this for the screenshot tool mentioned below.

Deer & Monkey Stuff in Japan

Nara (deer)
https://www.visitnara.jp/destinations/area/nara-park/
Famous free-roaming deer in Nara Park.
Arashiyama (monkeys)
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3912.html
Iwatayama Monkey Park overlooking Kyoto.
Kirishima
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e4625.html
Volcanic area with forests and wildlife. Deer roam on the Ebino Kogen side.
Kōjima (Kojima)
https://www.kanko-miyazaki.jp/en/sightseeing/1133
Small island off the coast of Miyazaki, known for its wild Japanese macaques and the original observations of food-washing behavior.
Miyajima
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3401.html
Island shrine site best known for Itsukushima Shrine and the “floating” torii gate, with free-roaming deer.

Miyazaki & Southern Kyushu

Miyazaki Prefecture
https://www.kanko-miyazaki.jp/en
Udo Jingu
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e8032.html
Shrine built into a seaside cave.
Toi Misaki
https://www.japan.travel/en/spot/1951/
Cape known for wild horses and coastal views.

Database stuff

Neon
https://neon.tech/
Serverless Postgres with branching.
Better Auth
https://www.better-auth.com/
Auth framework often discussed alongside modern DB-first stacks.
Row-Level Security (RLS)
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html
Native Postgres feature for per-row access control.
Supabase – Local development
https://supabase.com/docs/guides/local-development
Docker-based local stack. Some of us find it to be kind of clunky.
Supabase – No declarative schema
For those of us who use Prisma, not having a schema file is kind of a lifestyle downgrade.
SQLite
https://www.sqlite.org/index.html
Embedded, file-based database that keeps coming up in offline-first and local dev conversations.

Screenshots & Capture Tooling

Chrome DevTools – Screenshots
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/command-menu/#screenshots
Built-in full-page and node screenshots. In DevTools, Command+Shift+P then type in "full" to find command.
Ash’s screenshot tool
https://github.com/ashryanbeats/screenshot
Just a simple CLI for capturing full screenshots of webpages. I made this because DevTools often captures screenshots before images have loaded.