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).

A different aspect to this event from other maker conventions is the presence of many makers and hobbyists from YouTube. I have been watching CuriousMarc's series on restoring old HP Cesium atomic clocks, and I got to meet him in person... as he was restoring more vintage test equipment, like this HP 182C Oscilloscope:

He was even recording portions of his day at Open Sauce, and managed to find a fault in one of the two scopes he had on hand, while talking to hundreds of fans on the show floor!

Not only that, TubeTime and Ken Sheriff were there next to him, messing with old Apollo-era hardware among other things! (And others were popping by that booth throughout the days.

Daily Open Sauce Vlogs

I did not cover everything—nor could I—but I did record a bunch of snapshots of the kinds of booths and people you'd meet at Open Sauce. I published three vlogs, one from the preview night for exhibitors, content creators, and industry folks, and two from the days open to the general public:

A highlight from Day 0 was a coffee table which could walk around smoothly enough to hold a drink on top—and with a cooler hidden inside! The current iteration can't hold more than a hundred or so pounds reliably, but the concept has been proven, and material strength can be improved.

Day 1 (the first day Open Sauce was open to the general public), I was happy to meet with so many people who I've only interacted with online. I got to talk radio with the folks at both the Meshtastic and ADSBee booths, and modular computing with Nirav Patel from Framework.

I was also a small part of a panel of other YouTube content creators discussing Reverse Engineering. That link goes to a Sauce+ video; on a platform William Osman is starting up parallel to YouTube to try to help content creators and viewers in the maker community. It's an interesting new venture, and I may get my content up on that platform. It's not a replacement for YouTube, but I don't think it's trying to be.

On the final day, I spent as much time as I could walking around and talking to people. 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.

An Astronaut in the Homelab community

The most unexpected meeting at the event? Bumping into NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, who had just finished speaking in a panel on space exploration.

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.

NASA features many of Matthew's photos, but he told me he's also pushing for more sharing of the RAW image files and not just full-resolution JPEGs, since it would allow people to extract even more data from dramatic photos like those including both the dim stars beyond the Milky Way and the bright surface of the Earth, reflecting our much-closer Sun's light.

On to 2026 and even wilder fever dreams

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.

This year is the first time I drove south of SFO, both last month to make a video about microcontrollers, and this month for Open Sauce.

The area is radically different than San Francisco—much more like the suburbs I grew up in near St. Louis... just with property values maybe about 5x higher!

But speaking to many people who live or have lived in the area, there are few places on earth where you can dumpster dive or visit an estate sale and find vintage tech that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and defined an era of our technological history.

And at Open Sauce, sometimes you can see a slice of that. And meet some of the students and tinkerers who may push us into the next era.

(Photo above from Benjamin Faershtein, used with permission.)

I'm looking forward to 2026, and hoping the event can keep the same spirit that's grown for its nascent history.