I recently moved to Taiwan. I arrived six days ago, actually. The timing couldn't be better because Thor is organizing a HackerHouse event in Taiwan this week. This was also Supabase's Launch Week 13.

About HackerHouse Taiwan

HackerHouse is an event where open-source developers meet to visit Taiwan and co-work together. It's a week trip, although everyone is welcome to join only when they want. The plan is to visit Taipei on the first weekend and then spend the week at Kaohsiung.

When I learned about this, I thought it would be the perfect event to start my life in Taipei. This would be my chance to meet people working in the same field as me. Plus, it was a great way to get to know the city. So, I signed up immediately.

This week is also a Supabase Launch Week, so the Taipei community was hosting an event for the occasion. Most of the HackerHouse gang went to the event. It was the perfect occasion to kickstart the HackerHouse week and meet the local tech scene.

Meeting Taipei's local tech scene

Thanks to this meetup, and the evening’s talks, I got to meet some local builders.

The first speaker of the evening was Brandon, creator of Protomaps, a free and open-source map of the world. I knew about Protomaps, but I got to discover one of its users: Spectral Codex. It’s an urban exploration guide and travel journal (with awesome photography) that uses Protomaps to share the locations of the spots.

While the library wasn’t new to me, I discovered an awesome blog that I’ll definitely use to explore new spots in Taipei!

The next speaker was Ming-Cheng, co-founder of iChef, an all-in-one solution for restaurants. I heard it’s pretty big here in Taiwan. But he was here to present his latest indie hacking venture that he was building with Supabase, PictoTales, an AI-powered SaaS to help parents generate bedtime stories for their children.

I don’t think I’m the audience, but it was nice to see how he built a high-quality MVP using Supabase and the latest LLM goodies.

The last speaker was Yukaii, co-founder of HackMD, a real-time collaborative Markdown editor. I knew about the tool, too, because my colleagues at Meilisearch were using it a lot. But he, too, talked about his side project: zuzugo, an app to get notified about apartment listings in Taipei. Doubtless, I will use that in the future!

While I’m currently using Airbnb to explore different neighborhoods, I look forward to renting a place for the long term. Hopefully, it’ll be soon!

Wrapping up

This was just the first event I attended during my very first week in Taipei. And I already learned so many interesting things. I can’t wait to head to Kaohsiung next week and spend some time with the other folks joining from cool open-source companies like Supabase, Expo, and more.