OpenClaw Edition, Sydney AI Engineering meetup
Details
Hey all, please join us for a special OpenClaw edition AI Engineering meetup. Join us for an engaging session filled with exciting discussions and networking opportunities.
Don't miss out—RSVP to secure your spot. A big shout-out to Stone and Chalk for the venue! 🎉
🏠 Location: Stone & Chalk Sydney, Tech Central
🍕 Catering: Synadia 😊
Schedule:
- 5.30pm: Doors Open
- 6.00pm: Announcements and Welcome
- 6.10pm: 1st Talk
- 6.40pm: 2nd Talk
- 7.10pm: Networking
- 7.30pm: Doors Close
Speakers:
🎤 Peter Hanssens, Principal Consultant at Cloud Shuttle
Talk Title: The Lobster in Your Attic: What OpenClaw Is and Why It's Exploding
Talk Summary:
In just a few months, OpenClaw went from a weekend hack called "Clawdbot" to one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in history — 191,000 GitHub stars, two million website visitors in a week, and a creator who just joined OpenAI. So what is it actually? OpenClaw is a self-hosted AI agent that runs on your own machine and operates through the messaging apps you already use — WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, wherever. It doesn't just answer questions; it executes tasks, manages files, browses the web, and can even write its own new capabilities. In this session, Peter gives a plain-English tour of what OpenClaw is, how it works, what you can build with it, and the honest security caveats you need to know before you let it loose on your infrastructure.
Bio: Peter Hanssens is Principal Consultant at Cloud Shuttle, a data engineering consultancy based in Wollongong, and the organiser of DataEngBytes — Australia's largest data engineering community, running events across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth. With six years building data platforms for clients across cloud and on-prem environments, Peter has a habit of diving deep into whatever new technology is causing a stir — and then explaining it to everyone else. When he's not running conferences or consulting on data infrastructure, he's probably shipping Rust crates, exploring agentic AI tools, or nerding out with fellow founders at Stone & Chalk in Tech Central.
🎤 Chris Armstrong, Principal Engineer at Honey Insurance
Talk Title: Losing Control and Getting It Back: A field report on using LLMs with a little-known language
Talk Summary:
Three real projects, each using LLMs differently with OCaml, a niche language well outside mainstream model training data. The talk traces a journey from naive optimism, where LLMs confidently generate plausible-but-incomplete code, through the chaos of vibe-coded velocity, to a disciplined plan-execute-review loop with comprehensive test coverage and evolving coding guidelines. With niche FP languages, models try to reproduce their training language idioms, which degenerates quickly into unreadability. But with guidelines and correction, they begin to absorb the vibes of the surrounding code more than their training data, so the codebase itself becomes the most important prompt you write.
Bio:
Chris Armstrong is a systems engineer with over 15 years of experience, most recently as founding Principal Engineer at Honey Insurance, where he architected a platform supporting tens of thousands of policies. An active contributor to the OCaml open source community, he presented smaws, a modern AWS SDK for OCaml 5, at ICFP Singapore 2025. He writes at chrisarmstrong.dev and is on GitHub as chris-armstrong.
🎤 Open Mic
Got something cool that you've done with OpenClaw - here's 5 minutes to share what you've done!
About our Sponsor:
Synadia is the creator and maintainer of the low-latency opensource messaging fabric [NATS.io](http://nats.io/). Teams like NVIDIA, Replit, & Browserbase chose NATS.io because it makes AI architectures simple, resilient, and fast — run inference anywhere, route intelligently, respond in real-time. "Inference.net uses NATS.io to power the world's largest distributed GPU cluster spread across 73 countries".
Got an interesting talk for this or furture meetups? DM me!
Remember to bring along some great questions! See you all there...
