OPFA LAB

01 · 2–3 hours · About 15 people

OPFA Build Night

The format to try first

Everyone builds one small thing. A workshop is not a class. It is a machine that leaves projects behind.

15 people → 15 projects → 15 GitHub repos → 15 posts → 15 people who carry OPFA onward.

Examples

• Build an AI agent
• Build a mini SaaS
• Build a Raspberry Pi robot
• Build a mini P&ID digitizer
• Build an app with a new stack

Public artifact. A public repo and a post from each person.

02 · About 90 minutes · 10–30 people

OPFA AI Lab

AI research becomes a prototype. OPFA is a place that makes technology, not a place that listens to talks.

Pick one narrow build. Leave with a demo that runs.

Examples

• Build RAG in 90 minutes
• Train a small vision model
• OCR to structured data
• An AI agent with tools
• A local LLM on a GPU
• Multimodal AI
• AI and robotics

Public artifact. A demo that runs before people leave.

03 · One evening · 10–20 people

OPFA Open Source Night

Open an OPFA repo to the room. The night has one line: tonight we ship pull request number one.

Clone, pick an issue, code, open a pull request, merge.

Examples

• Start with a small OPFA project
• First contribution is the point

Public artifact. Workshop → pull request → contributor → GitHub activity → community.

04 · About 3 hours · 10–20 people

OPFA Tech Archaeology

Pick an old technology that still matters, then rebuild a tiny piece of it. The feeling is engineering culture.

Let’s rebuild it. Example: a tiny Unix shell in C, three hours.

Examples

• Unix
• TCP/IP
• Lisp
• Smalltalk
• Xerox PARC
• Plan 9
• Erlang
• FPGA
• Early AI
• ARPANET

Public artifact. A small reconstruction people can show.

05 · 4 hours · 5–10 people

OPFA 0 → 1

A group receives one problem and four hours to turn it into a prototype: research, design, code, deploy, demo.

A numbered series: OPFA 0→1 #001, #002, #003. The number is the brand.

Examples

• A small restaurant needs to track revenue

Public artifact. A deployed demo with a series number.

06 · 90 minutes · 8–16 people

OPFA Research Club

One paper a week. Not a long presentation. Ten minutes on the paper, twenty to break it down, thirty to reproduce, thirty to discuss.

Let’s reproduce this vision paper.

Examples

• A notebook
• A benchmark
• A GitHub repo
• A blog post

Public artifact. Technical content: notebook, benchmark, repo, and a write-up.

07 · One evening · 10–20 people

OPFA Hardware Night

Each person gets a small kit: a board, a sensor, a motor. Hardware nights are more social than laptop-only rooms, and they are easy to film.

Build a robot that detects and avoids obstacles. Or build a small weather station.

Examples

• ESP32, sensor, and motor
• Obstacle-avoiding robot
• IoT weather station

Public artifact. A moving kit and a short video.

08 · One session · Small teams

OPFA P&ID Lab

Tied to the OPFA P&ID digitizer. The question is whether AI can understand a chemical plant. The night also shows who can do the work.

PDF → OCR and vision → symbols → entities → connection graph → digital P&ID.

Examples

• Each team digitizes one P&ID

Public artifact. One digitized P&ID per team.

09 · About an hour · A small room

OPFA After Dark

Not a technical build. Three founders or engineers. Fifteen minutes each: one thing I got wrong. What happened, why it happened, what I learned. No pitch. No motivational speech.

What happened → why it happened → what I learned.

Examples

• Also called Failure Lab
• Different from a company workshop

Public artifact. A story people retell, and a room that feels unlike a company event.

10 · One evening · 10–30 people

OPFA French × Tech

A niche that belongs to OPFA: French and technology, between Vietnam and France. Students, engineers, founders, researchers in one room.

French plus technology, in the same night.

Examples

• Twenty French words for AI engineers
• Build a tiny AI agent while speaking French
• French Tech Night

Public artifact. A room that only OPFA would host, and people who bring a friend next time.