Last week was pretty great! 

- I held down the fort and explored web-based virtual reality projects during the women and nonbinary hack and do whatever nights. In the middle of job searching so can't do much more but I plan a workshop on Blender + web virtual reality between all headsets.

Tuesday hacker night
Continues to be cool. I went and haven't had time to mess with the robot, but Jake is making progress. Had a dream of one day hooking up a virtual reality headset with a game controller to the robot so that people with a Quest or VisionPro could view the space with their headsets and interact with people.

Maybe there's a cheaper open source way to do it with webcams. That would be cool!  Might be a future project.

More people coming to the space that I met at Augmented reality hackathons. It's cool! Hope we can get more artsy people in too. 

It's just great to be able to socialize and talk in the space. While we do talk start-up shop talk, it's nice to have a space where you're not pressured to monetize by VCs. 

The last sessions at SudoRoom have been fun, I had time to explore and hack. While it's nice to see presentations by outside people, it's nice to return to the roots of sudoroom, which is using it as a hackerspace. 

For orientation maybe we can have "here's how to contribute to the wiki"

We had a nice session two weeks back where many people expressed interest in using Blender. So a "Blender for noobies" event.

The MADE game museum in Old oakland has meetups wednesdays for digital creators. Would like to involve them with SudoRomo, especially around light projectors Just don't have time lately.

Women who code has disbanded, which leaves a big spaces for people who want to meet. Fortunately and unfortunately most women's groups revolve around people who are looking for a job =P While I'm an idealist and want to have spaces for people who love programming for the fun of it (long term I think these people are also more employable) will probably plan some "get a job" leetcode heck meetups for the women and non binary night. 


Some not so fun stuff:

There are a number of VC-funded "third space" "hackerspaces" popping up in San Francisco mostly. They are great, but I've noticed some of them are planting people in SudoRoom sometimes to get them to go to those for profit spaces. It's a strong hunch I believe to be true, but if you are doing so, please be transparent. 

Have had encounters with people who come to hackerspaces (they won't be named) using it as a dating service. FYI sudoroom and Noisebridge are not dating services for guys desperate to have a girlfriend. I have yet to meet a cool woman who comes to hackerspaces who is hot to date guys there. 
 Dating apps are great for that kind of thing, and there are speed-dating meetups in the city. 


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Romy Ilano