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Open Sauce is a confoundingly brilliant Bay Area event
This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube solvers: Sprawling over the grounds of the San Mateo County Event Center, I met people of all ages who were building all sorts of zany contraptions. Sometimes practical, sometimes wildly impractical (like a hot dog race track that tazes the winning weiner).
I especially enjoyed conversation with some of the volunteers who were mentoring people soldering the first time (to populate the badge PCB), or repairing little bits of broken inventions brought over from exhibitors. He told me he's been watching videos on Proxmox and TrueNAS (among other homelab-friendly open source tools), with the goal building out a homelab to handle the 20 TB or so of RAW photos he took with the Nikon cameras on the ISS. When I worked in open source enterprise software, I had visited the SFO area a number of times—but always flying in and driving straight north into the dense urban environment.
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