Open Source

**Dear members**, we are excited to invite you on our FIRST of the 2026 Meetup, on January 29th to an evening filled with insightful talks and networking opportunities at the **Acronis's Office** at [NV Tower](https://g.co/kgs/GgnfymB) If you are attending our meetup that means you share the same passion as we do for Cloud Native technologies, and you can share your experience with the **community** by filling out this form: [Submit a talk!](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc7MOf2GKVMZjemvfZbo8IuWSwSe7B-7I_p-QUUsG644UTUOg/viewform?usp=header) 🗓️ Date: **29th January** 🕕 Time: **19:00h** 📍 Location: [Acronis](https://maps.app.goo.gl/UgRnknBhar2VgGRK9) **Agenda:** **19:05** \- Welcome **19:10** \- GitOps на ден втори или как да сложим ред в хаоса с Harbor\, ArgoCD\, Renovate и N8N \- Илиян Петков\, DojoBits **19:40 - TBA** **20:10** \- TCP Networking \- talk/chat/pizza Refreshments and networking opportunities will be available. Be sure to **RSVP** and save your spot for an evening of learning and community building. We look forward to seeing you there! CNCF Community Group event: [Register here as well!](https://community.cncf.io/events/details/cncf-cloud-native-sofia-presents-cloud-native-amp-platform-engineering-meetup-january-2026-acronis/) Please stay tuned for more details and updates on our Meetup page.

* **About the event:** **Product-led Growth: Practical Product Assessment and Implementation Strategies** *How sales-led B2B companies can meaningfully adopt Product-led Growth* Product-led Growth (PLG) is no longer just a buzzword - it has become a strategic priority for many established, sales-led B2B SaaS companies. Driven by changing buyer behavior and increasingly digital, remote-first markets, PLG promises faster, more scalable growth at lower acquisition costs. But what does that actually look like in practice? Join us for an honest, experience-based walk-through of LucidLink’s Product-led Growth journey so far. In this talk, we’ll cut through the hype and explore what parts of PLG truly deliver impact and where companies often struggle. Drawing on both current PLG research and real-world examples from LucidLink, we’ll discuss how to evaluate product readiness for PLG and how to design implementation strategies that work within a traditionally sales-led organization. * **What we’ll cover:** * Core principles of Product-led Growth and PLG product readiness * How to assess whether (and where) PLG makes sense for your product * Practical implementation patterns and learnings from LucidLink’s experience * What PLG can realistically deliver—beyond the hype * **Who should attend** * Product Professionals interested in Growth Product Management * Leaders and operators in B2B SaaS * Anyone working in a sales-led organization exploring PLG strategies Whether you’re already familiar with LucidLink’s technology or simply interested in strengthening your product strategy with thoughtfully applied PLG tactics, this meet-up will offer practical insights and an open discussion with the LucidLink Product Team and the wider product community. * **About the speaker:** Mariya Mladenova is a Senior Product Manager at LucidLink, leading the Monetization and Growth product area. She brings over 8 years of experience in Product Management, including strategic product leadership at one of Berlin’s largest unicorns-turned-public companies. Mariya is passionate about product strategy, growth, and building products that scale sustainably. * **About LucidLink:** LucidLink is the storage collaboration platform that frees creative teams to work together from anywhere. With a single shared filespace protected by zero-knowledge encryption, your team can instantly and securely access, edit and share projects of any size. Combining the ease of a local drive with the power of the cloud, LucidLink gives you on-demand access to your files. Now you can get straight to work without downloading, syncing or versioning disasters. Just like its customers, LucidLink's teams work together from anywhere. Privately held and headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an office in Sofia, Bulgaria, LucidLink's hybrid and remote employees work across Europe, North America and Australia. Discover more at [www.lucidlink.com](http://www.lucidlink.com) **Come join the conversation!**

**Founders Running Club** (FRC) brings founders, investors, tech, creative people and startup enthusiasts together for weekly easy runs and networking. We like to be comfortable when we run and finish with coffee and conversations. Choose your pace or follow a pacer—pets, friends, family, are welcome. 🗓️ Launched in San Francisco, July 16, 2022 🌍 Now in 35+ cities 📅 Running + Networking events + Community **Join the community** [http://foundersrc.com/chats](http://foundersrc.com/chats) **Stay updated**: Instagram [http://instagram.com/foundersrc/](http://instagram.com/foundersrc/) Podcast [http://podcast.foundersrc.com/](http://podcast.foundersrc.com/) LinkedIn [http://linkedin.com/company/foundersrc/](http://linkedin.com/company/foundersrc/) Strava [http://strava.com/clubs/foundersRC](http://strava.com/clubs/foundersRC) Website [http://foundersrc.com/](http://foundersrc.com/)

Разходка от спирката на метрото на стадион Васил Левски. Вижте [нашата страница](https://peshachko.bg/events/events/) за повече информация. Елате на неангажираща групова разходка, където просто се събираме и се разхождаме заедно в приятна компания. Няма програма или изисквания – само движение, разговори и добро настроение.

Columbus Code & Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. People of all skill levels attend, and we love it that way. Many people (optionally) bring projects to work on, and many other people (optionally) socialize the entire time. It's entirely up to you! **What to Expect at the Intro Circle** \~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~ Near the beginning of the event (1:30 pm), we do a standup: * Organizer announcements, updates, and logistics Round 1 - (7 secs max): * Your name * What you're working on * What you can help others with Round 2: * Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. Round 3: * Job opportunities you're hiring for OR announce that you are looking for one. If none, that's cool. After the introduction circle, everything is self-organized! Feel free to work alone, pair up, attend one of our workshops/presentations, or mingle!

### Tools in your AI's Toolbox : An introduction to MCP Servers The generative AI revolution has unlocked unprecedented capabilities, but the next frontier is agency: empowering models to interact with, query, and act upon the world. The current challenge is the “N x M integration problem,” where every AI model requires a custom, brittle integration for each external tool or data source. This approach simply doesn’t scale. How can we give an AI access to our sales leads, code repositories, or IoT devices in a standardized, secure, and reusable way? This session introduces Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open-source framework designed to solve this challenge and become the universal connector—the USB-C port—for AI. MCP standardizes how AI models discover and use external tools, moving beyond simple function-calling to a robust, client-server architecture. We will dive into how this open protocol is creating a new ecosystem for building powerful, context-aware AI agents. Join this session for a developer-focused introduction where you will learn how to: Understand the core concepts of the open-source Model Context Protocol and its architecture. Utilize pre-built, open-source MCP servers to instantly connect AI to tools like Git, Slack, and databases. Build a custom MCP server to securely expose your own proprietary data and APIs as tools for any compliant AI. Move beyond bespoke integrations and contribute to a standardized, collaborative, and open ecosystem. Stop building one-off connectors and start building intelligent agents. This session will give you the practical knowledge to leverage MCP and create the next generation of AI that doesn’t just talk, but does. Want to be a speaker? submit your talk to our Call for Presenters!!! [https://sessionize.com/azure-cbus-2026/](https://sessionize.com/azure-cbus-2026/)

Come out to Improving for our monthly iOS and Mac meetings. This Month's Presentation: Nothing yet. (You should volunteer). What is Cocoaheads (http://cocoaheads.org/)? CocoaHeads is a group devoted to discussion of Apple Computer's Cocoa Framework for programming on MacOS X and iOS (including the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch). During monthly meetings, members present on their projects and offer tutorials on various programming topics. What is BuckeyeCocoa (http://buckeyecocoa.org/)? BuckeyeCocoa is a group of Objective-C/Swift developers/enthusiasts. We host monthly Cocoaheads and near-weekly NSCoder meetings in Columbus, Ohio. The meetings are free to attend. Presentations! Presenters welcome! We are always in need of people willing to present material. Any Swift and/or Objective-C related topic is welcome. Times can be 5 minutes (i.e. lightning talks) to a maximum of 2 hours. Interested? Contact info is on the BuckeyeCocoa website. To volunteer for a presentation contact us at @BuckeyeCocoa on Twitter. Follow us on Twitter! @BuckeyeCocoa (https://twitter.com/#!/Buckeyecocoa/) For more information: http://buckeyecocoa.org/

**Chaos Monkeys, Open Telemetry, and .NET Aspire: Taming Complexity in Modern Apps** .NET Aspire is far more than just a sleek dashboard for wowing your boss and co-workers. It's also a gateway to increased observability with open telemetry, better fault tolerance to fend off chaos monkeys, and a drastically improved onboarding experience for new developers. This session will explore Microsoft's latest guidance for building distributed, cloud-first applications, with practical strategies for enhancing simpler existing apps. You'll discover the inner workings of Aspire, from installation to customization, and learn how it streamlines integration with performance boosters like Redis. Most importantly, you'll see why scalable microservices architectures can be challenging—and how Aspire helps simplify the journey. **Presenter:** Lee Richardson, Microsoft MVP **Pizza starts at 6. Presentation starts around 6:30.**

## Learn Infrastructure-as-Code (the FUN Way) — Through Minecraft 🎮☁️ **Joint Meetup: Azure CBUS × Columbus HashiCorp User Group** What if learning Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code didn’t feel like a whitepaper… but more like a game? Join us for a joint Azure CBUS and Columbus HashiCorp User Group meetup where **Mark Tinderholt** \(Principal Architect\, Microsoft Azure \| HashiCorp Ambassador \| “The Azure Terraformer”\) shows how **Minecraft** can be used as a surprisingly powerful way to understand real-world Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. In this session, Mark will demonstrate how Terraform and Azure can be used to provision, configure, and manage Minecraft servers—while teaching the same patterns you’d use for production cloud infrastructure. ### What we’ll cover * Infrastructure-as-Code fundamentals using **Terraform** * Provisioning real infrastructure on **Azure** * Applying **IaC best practices** (immutability, repeatability, versioning) * How playful environments like Minecraft make complex concepts *click* * Why learning through experimentation beats click-ops every time ### Who should attend * Developers, platform engineers, and cloud engineers * Terraform users (new or experienced) * Anyone curious about Infrastructure-as-Code but tired of boring examples * Minecraft fans who want to see it used in a totally unexpected way No prior Minecraft experience required—just curiosity and a willingness to learn infrastructure the fun way. Come for the blocks, stay for the Terraform. 🧱➡️📐 Want to be a speaker? submit your talk to our Call for Presenters!!! https://sessionize.com/cbus-hug-2026/

**New Dojo Location!** **Draft Day Columbus** 1130 Dublin Road Columbus, OH 43215 We're going to try a new dojo location for a few weeks and see how it works Dojos are informal Python group study sessions where everyone interested in Python gathers to learn about Python, help others with Python, or just hang out. Everyone is welcome from Python beginners to experts. Bringing a laptop is encouraged (we'll have extension cords and power strips). If there's something you want to learn leave a comment on this invite so we can plan ahead. We're looking for topic suggestions and people interested in presenting at our monthly meetings. To this end we've set up a survey form at [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15eBKF1nQQ2XS5gzD4rvhVRHMBEj7lJtHuA9wXupS3Uc](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15eBKF1nQQ2XS5gzD4rvhVRHMBEj7lJtHuA9wXupS3Uc)