[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: Garage Door Opener, Vibe Coding and Recovery (April 2026)

[Paul Nijjar]

Happy April Showers, everyone. This month's KWLUG features
presentations about personal projects from our members, which are
the kinds of presentations we always love hosting (hint, hint). Both
presentations discuss the somewhat contentious use of LLM coding
agents, and thus may not be to everyone's tastes, but they also are
genuine stories of human experiences, so I hope we can extend our
famous KWLUG kindness to both our presenters.

J. Lucas Donkers wanted to open his garage door using his smartphone.
Using an Arduino, a spare garage door remote, and some Python scripts,
he made a tool that allows him to open his garage door by typing in a
PIN. He will tell us what he did and how it worked. 

Colin K experienced a health problem some time ago and faced a long
recovery. As part of that recovery he used LLM agents to help him
program and stay functional. In this presentation Colin will share
some of his journey.


In dinner meetup news, our next dinner-only meetup is scheduled
Wednesday, April 29, at Crabby Joe's. RSVP to dinner at kwlug.org if you
would like to participate. There are more details here: https://kwlug.org/node/1477

Next month the Free Software Foundation is running LibreLocal events
across the globe, and some KWLUG members are interested in running one
in KW. If you would like to help in organizing this event please reach
out to me personally or use the contact functionality on the website.

In other event news, there is quite a lot going on this month. You can
find many events on https://watcamp.com . Some events of interest
include a Waterloo Robotics event on April 16, some Hard Tech Happy
Hours on April 15 and April 29, a UW CPI talk on deepfakes and the law
on April 23, and the Civictech showcase on April 22. Find details
about these events on Watcamp.

That's all I got for this month. Our meeting on Monday starts at 7pm.
It will be held online at https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug
and in-person at DC 1568 at the Davis Centre library at the University
of Waterloo. It should go without saying, but all are welcome. 

- Paul