> Meeting Archive
A record of everything discussed and decided — newest first.
Casual, wide-ranging session. Whit shared that an HEB SXP/Digital team partner he'd met in-store submitted the Store Assistant CAPTCHA/Siri-shortcut idea to HEB's internal suggestion box, and Lawrence demoed his personal Christmas-lighting home-automation project — a spatial fixture database with local-network light control, running on his home server with Claude's help. The group revisited the old Cooking Connections recipe-history site, discussing why HEB had it taken down and feature ideas for a future version. After Lawrence left, Whit and Yohannes talked AI ethics, limitations, and vibe coding, then Yohannes gave an in-depth walkthrough of the Godot 2D action game he's building solo — combo timers, elemental status effects, and a composition-over-inheritance architecture.
Whit demoed his full home server self-hosting setup — Tailscale, Jellyfin, Radarr, Sonar, and Orbstack — walking Lawrence through how it all fits together. The two also scoped out the Deli Cheese Inventory project and discussed collaboration workflow for the team. Wide-ranging discussion on AI privacy, autonomous agents, and surveillance tech.
Discussed the rapid rise of agentic programming workflows with Claude Code, explored security concerns around autonomous AI agents, and shared experiences building software with AI-assisted development.
No recording exists for this meeting. Based on context, Whit likely walked Nate through the active SSI projects, and the two discussed free and open knowledge on the internet — touching on Richard Stallman and the free software philosophy.
Whit demoed the Store Assistant scraper progress built with Claude Code — the server can now select the nearest HEB store from a GPS address and search for a product. Lawrence showed his Shortcuts progress on the input side. The group got IP-blocked by HEB mid-session from testing too aggressively, but confirmed the core architecture is solid.
First meeting after Whit's wedding and honeymoon. The group kicked off the Store Assistant — Product Location Lookup project: designing the full workflow from Siri shortcut to web scraping HEB.com and returning an aisle location. Whit scaffolded the new unified server and attempted to get Puppeteer running, hitting setup issues most of the session.
Nate joined for the first time. Whit and Lawrence continued work on the Seafood SKU Lookup project while Whit walked through the basics in parallel so Nate could follow along.
Hands-on Git and GitHub deep dive with Lawrence. Whit walked through the full version control workflow — commits, staging, .gitignore, remotes, cloning, forking, and branches — while Lawrence set up VS Code, created a GitHub account, and forked the Seafood SKU Lookup repo. Lawrence also shared progress on manually cleaning and verifying the fish data file.
Hands-on build session. Whit walked Lawrence through the Seafood SKU Lookup codebase — Express server, JSON data structure, and the fish name matching logic. They deployed it to Vercel and spent the second half of the meeting trying to wire it into Siri via Apple Shortcuts, getting most of the way there.
No recording or notes available for this meeting.
Two new members joined — Oscar and Don. Whit continued the Linux deep dive from last meeting, demoed Ollama running a local LLM with a browser UI, and introduced the group to self-hosting philosophy. New members got the SSI mission overview and heard pitches for both active project ideas.
Free-form tech discussion meeting. Whit gave a deep dive into Linux — why he switched, how distributions work, the kernel, Wayland/Hyprland, and hotkey-driven workflows. Group discussed AI's magnitude as a technology shift. Recording stopped partway through so the second half isn't captured.
Two new faces joined — Whit demoed Brindl and walked through Next.js live, Los shared his Firebase sales tracker. Group reviewed last meeting's ideas, chose the volunteer/community opportunity board as the first project, and brainstormed its structure. Agreed to move to biweekly meetings.
First ever SSI meeting — Whit introduced the initiative's mission, attendees shared their backgrounds and curiosity about tech, and the group brainstormed workflow pain points at the store. Wrapped with a primer on how software and the web works.