A community organization promoting open source software and collaborative development in Houston, Texas. Zola 2026-08-05T19:00:00-06:00 https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/atom.xml 2026-08-05T19:00:00-06:00 2026-08-05T19:00:00-06:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/architecture-still-matters/ <p>As AI-assisted development becomes more common, teams are discovering new challenges around consistency, quality, and control. This session explores how structured development practices—such as architecture, testing, and evaluation frameworks—can be applied to AI workflows to improve reliability and outcomes. Through a practical experiment comparing different approaches, we’ll highlight patterns that help teams move beyond ad hoc prompting toward more scalable, repeatable development processes.</p> 2026-07-01T00:00:00+00:00 2026-07-01T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/members/yevhen-soldatov/ <h2 id="about-me">About Me</h2> <p>Core maintainer and lead architect of <a rel="external" href="https://github.com/ml-cab/juno">Juno</a> (<em>Java Unified Neural Orchestration</em>) — an Apache 2.0, pure-Java framework for distributed LLM inference on the JVM. I work on coordinator/worker serving, GPU paths (CUDA / ROCm via Panama FFI), and OpenAI-compatible APIs so Java teams can evaluate on-prem LLM inference without a Python sidecar.</p> <p>I live in the Houston area, work at Luxoft USA, and have demoed Juno at a HOSS Heights meetup. Happy to talk JVM systems, open source, and local inference.</p> 2026-06-17T18:00:00-06:00 2026-06-17T18:00:00-06:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/rocket-league-plugin-framework/ <p>What do you do when there’s no SDK, no stable API, incomplete documentation, and every game update threatens to break your work? This talk explores the architecture and engineering behind a hot-loadable plugin framework and SDK generator built through reverse engineering Rocket League and Unreal Engine, using the project as a case study in systems thinking under hostile conditions. Along the way we’ll touch on reverse engineering, Unreal Engine internals, C++, automation, AI-assisted development, and designing software that survives constant change. No prior experience with game modding or reverse engineering is required—the emphasis is on engineering decisions, trade-offs, and lessons that apply well beyond games.</p> 2026-02-04T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-04T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/events/ai-day/2026-02-04/ <p>Join us for the second AI Day event! Following the tremendous success of our inaugural AI Day, we're continuing our quarterly exploration of AI and open source technologies.</p> <p>Pizzas and sodas will be provided by Improving Houston.</p> <p><strong>Like all Houston Open Source Society [HOSS] events, it's totally 100% free.</strong></p> 2026-02-04T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-04T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/grafana-mcp-for-infa/ <p>This will show case how we can host the Grafana MCP, manage authentication when deployed alongside a kube-prometheus-stack operator for incident investigation/postmortoms and remidation.</p> <p>Kube promethues stack creates promethues which is a timeseries database we can use to record resource metrics, error rates etc, when combined with loki we can have an agent parse logs and even bring up the URL for the dashboard. kube-prometheus-stack also creates promethes rules which creates alerts for things like failed pods/jobs/out of storage etc.</p> 2026-02-04T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-04T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/using-ai-to-isolate-problems/ <p>In this talk I'll present you a problem regarding Twitch and IntersectionObserver v2. I'll talk about how I struggled with the problem, and how I ended up overcoming it in isolation of the application.</p> 2026-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 2026-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/danyal-mahmud/ <p>Danyal Mahmud, with Terrence Persaud, took over from Christina and became a point of contact with Improving.</p> 2026-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 2026-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/terrence-persaud/ <p>Terrence Persaud, with Danyal Mahmud, took over from Christina and became our point of contact with Improving. He attends all of our meetups, and handles the pizza and drink accommodations of the group.</p> 2025-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/events/homeops/2025-12-17/ <h2 id="event">Event</h2> <p><em>HomeOps 2025: The Art of Doing It Yourself</em> will be both our first meeting at The Ion, and our first event in a series of events we intend to do that focuses on Home Labs, and self-hosting.</p> <ul> <li>Want to provide a service to your family or business without paying $20/user/month?</li> <li>Want to own your data?</li> <li>Want to avoid vendor lock-in?</li> </ul> <p>In <em>HomeOps: The Art of Doing It Yourself</em> we will focus on what you can do for business, family, and community when you own your own hardware and run your own services.</p> <h2 id="what-to-expect">What to Expect</h2> <p>HomeOps events typically feature:</p> <ul> <li>Technical talks and presentations on Kubernetes</li> <li>Helm installed software</li> <li>Home automation</li> <li>Media hosting (movies, mp3s, audiobooks, books)</li> <li>Hardware demonstrations and assessments</li> </ul> <p><strong>Like all Houston Open Source Society (HOSS) events, it's totally 100% free.</strong></p> <h2 id="sponsor">Sponsor</h2> <img alt="Impact Hub Houston logo" src="/assets/logo/Impact-Hub-Houston.png" width="240" style="float:left; margin: 0 0.5em 0em 0"> <p>Special thanks goes out to <a href="/thanks/orgs/impact-hub">Impact Hub Houston</a> for helping secure the space at The Ion. They're a key part of making this meetup happen. The Houston Open Source Society is a group that refuses money and exists with no legal structure. That makes it a challenge to procure quality space for our meetings. <strong>Impact Hub played a pivotal role in helping us overcome this challenge.</strong></p> <p>For more information on the Impact Hub Houston, check them out in <a href="/thanks/orgs/impact-hub">our directory</a>.</p> 2025-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/k3s-kubeapps/ <p>In this talk I will present how you can get started with kubernetes by self-hosting your own single-machine cluster with k3s, and getting up a Wordpress and other services with kubeapps.</p> 2025-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/members/brian-ramirez/ 2025-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/members/nicholas-romero/ <p>Full-stack software engineer with experience architecting, deploying and supporting technical solutions. Including automation of tasks, quality assurance, uptime reliability and cloud migrations. Speaker at PyCon India and other community meetups.</p> 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/christina-liles/ <p>Christina is our primary point of contact with Improving. Whether it's a pizza order, scheduling, or accommodations, she's quick to take care of it. Moreover, we're not the only group that has a monthly meetup at Improving; Improving hosts a different group just about every day. They're making a big impact in Houston's tech community, and Christina is the engine at Improving driving that community engagement.</p> 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/grace-rodriguez/ <p>If not for Grace organizing the Houston Hackathon, and having personally extended the invite to her network at Impact Hub Houston, we never would have secured the space at The Ion. Thanks a ton, Grace!</p> <p>(Aside from all that, <a rel="external" href="https://gracerodriguez.com/about/">she contributes to most everything in Houston</a>)</p> 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/he-zhu/ <p>He Zhu is our resident videographer and photographer. He has roughly 230 million followers on YouTube. If it wasn't for He Zhu, Houston would be living in the dark. He captures more video than CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox combined. He's a one-man army, and we're glad to have him as a regular at our meetup.</p> <p>His brother is pretty great too. A close second.</p> <p>Give the great <a rel="external" href="https://www.youtube.com/@hezhu6938">He Zhu of HOSS a Like and Subscribe</a>.</p> 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/jessie-penilla/ <p>For years Jessie was our designated Improver who used to supervise our meetings on-site. We always appreciated that. Because of a professional assignment elsewhere, he's on location less often now, but it's always great to see him. He's also our fallback contact when we need to get a hold of someone at Improving for whatever reason.</p> <p>Jessie can be counted on to stay engaged during talks, to ask insightful questions, and to be a productive member of the group, even if he's only there on official duty with Improving.</p> <p>Outside of his work at Improving, Jessie has helped many members of HOSS prepare for interviews, and if you're really good at your mock interview, you may leave with an invitation to interview with Improving.</p> 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/maria-burgos/ <p>Maria was our point of contact at the Impact Hub to make magic happen with The Ion.</p> 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/michelle-avalos/ <p>Michelle helped host the Houston Hackathon 2025, organized by Impact Hub Houston.</p> 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/thanks/people/tracie-jae/ <p>Tracie Jae handled the organizational onboarding of HOSS members and ensured our application got to the right people at the Impact Hub Houston.</p> 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/events/ai-day/2025-11-05/ <p>Come join us at Improving Houston for AI Day. This is our first event tailored to AI. Pizzas and sodas will be provided by Improving Houston.</p> <p><strong>Like all Houston Open Source Society [HOSS] events, it's totally 100% free.</strong></p> 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/agentic-rag/ 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/open-webui/ 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/openrouter/ 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 2025-11-05T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/self-hosted-agentic-coding/ 2025-10-10T00:00:00+00:00 2025-10-10T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/members/jason-ho/ <h2 id="about-me">About Me</h2> <p>I want to become a better programmer and solve some cool problems using technology :).</p> 2025-09-24T00:00:00+00:00 2025-09-24T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/members/evan-carroll/ <h2 id="about-me">About Me</h2> <p>Long time open source user in Houston with roots back to HAL-PC. I was one of the founding members of HOSS and I'm passionate about programming and open source software development.</p> <p>I'm very active in the open data community, contributing extensively to OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, and Wikipedia. I believe in the power of open knowledge and collaborative mapping to improve our communities.</p> <hr /> <hr /> <h2 id="open-source-contributions">Open Source Contributions</h2> <h3 id="openstreetmap">OpenStreetMap</h3> <p>I'm an active contributor to OpenStreetMap, focusing on mapping Houston and the surrounding areas. I work on adding and improving local businesses, civic infrastructure, and geographical features to make Houston one of the best-mapped cities in Texas.</p> <h3 id="wikidata-wikipedia">Wikidata &amp; Wikipedia</h3> <p>I contribute to Wikidata and Wikipedia, documenting Houston organizations, locations, and notable people. My work helps connect structured data across platforms and makes Houston's information more accessible globally.</p> <h3 id="software-development">Software Development</h3> <p>I created the first version of the HOSS website and continue to contribute to its development. The site is built with Zola (a static site generator written in Rust) and integrates data from OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons.</p> <hr /> <h2 id="technologies-expertise">Technologies &amp; Expertise</h2> <h3 id="primary-focus">Primary Focus</h3> <p><strong>Rust</strong>: I'm deeply passionate about Rust development, from systems programming to web applications. I publish crates and contribute to the Rust ecosystem.</p> <p><strong>PostgreSQL</strong>: With years of experience, I specialize in database design, optimization, and advanced PostgreSQL features. I've contributed to PostgreSQL community resources and help others learn best practices.</p> <h3 id="additional-expertise">Additional Expertise</h3> <ul> <li><strong>Linux/Debian</strong>: Long-time Linux user and Debian enthusiast</li> <li><strong>Web Development</strong>: JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js for full-stack development</li> <li><strong>Legacy Systems</strong>: Perl expertise for maintaining and modernizing older codebases</li> <li><strong>Python</strong>: Data processing, scripting, and automation</li> </ul> <hr /> <hr /> <h2 id="community-involvement">Community Involvement</h2> <h3 id="houston-open-source-society">Houston Open Source Society</h3> <p>As a founding member of HOSS, I'm committed to building a strong open source community in Houston. I regularly attend meetings and help organize events.</p> <hr /> <h3 id="coworking">Coworking</h3> <p>Check out our <code>#coworking</code> channel on Discord where I regularly post my location around Houston. I'm usually working on open source projects, database optimization, or Rust development. Feel free to come join me if you want to get out of the house and write some code!</p> <h2 id="writing-blog">Writing &amp; Blog</h2> <p>I maintain a blog on Substack where I write about:</p> <ul> <li>Technology and software development</li> <li>Open source software and community</li> <li>Database design and PostgreSQL</li> <li>Rust programming</li> <li>Global and national politics</li> <li>Houston civic technology</li> </ul> <p>Visit my <a rel="external" href="https://substack.evancarroll.com/">Substack blog</a> to read my latest articles and subscribe for updates.</p> 2025-09-14T00:00:00+00:00 2025-09-14T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/members/chason-deshotel/ <h2 id="about-me">About Me</h2> <p>Abundance mindset. Knowledge is meant to be shared 🌈</p> <h2 id="software">Software</h2> <p>I enjoy empowering users by extending the capabilities of software and hardware, reviving legacy products after vendors abandon them, and contributing back to open source. My favorite projects live at the intersection of reverse engineering, systems architecture, and "this probably shouldn't be possible."</p> <h2 id="audio">Audio</h2> <p>I'm a producer, DJ, and audio engineer. I've been involved in online radio since 2007 and host a regular show on Sub FM where I answer the question "will it blend?" across a wide range of bass-heavy genres in "non-denominational" sets. I'm passionate about preserving and sharing the history of early dubstep and classic Houston rap, and have spent years tracking down hard-to-find releases to help keep that history accessible. More than once, that work has led to reconnecting artists and their families with recordings they no longer had.</p> <h2 id="gaming">Gaming</h2> <p>I'm a top 50 Rocket League player... in exterminations. Top 100 in demolitions. I wrote a mod to add custom quick chat that somehow spiraled into a 45,000-line Unreal Engine plugin framework.</p> <h2 id="dogs">Dogs</h2> <p>My flyball partner Mishka and I retired after earning an FDX title, highlighted by a 0.000 perfect start at the World Series of Dog Shows. These days, we're focused on scent work and compete in Barn Hunt.</p> 2025-09-01T00:00:00+00:00 2025-09-01T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/members/garret-noble/ <h2 id="about-me">About Me</h2> <p>Senior Software Engineer specializing in AI integration, high-performance systems, and real-time applications. With over 8 years of experience, I've developed cutting-edge solutions like genomic data platforms processing 1,000+ messages/second at Baylor College of Medicine, engineered Python data pipelines for scientific workflows at Uncountable, and built predictive analytics tools for Fortune 500 companies including ExxonMobil and Albemarle.</p> 2025-09-01T00:00:00+00:00 2025-09-01T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/members/moses-ling/ <h2 id="about-me">About Me</h2> <p>Strategic and results-driven Engineering Leader with over 25 years of experience spanning the complete engineering lifecycle and directing multi-disciplinary teams to deliver successful EPC projects, product development initiatives, and R&amp;D programs. Demonstrated ability to steer complex projects from inception to completion, showcasing strong leadership, technical acumen, and innovative problem-solving skills.</p> 1999-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 1999-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://www.houstonopensourcesociety.com/talks/containerizing-claude-cli/ <p>In this talk I will present how you can containerize Claude CLI to mitigate its ability for unbounded exfiltration. We will use Podman to create a barrier around Claude CLI and limit its access level.</p>