Cursor at Waterloo

It started in New York. I went down for a Cursor community event and ended up spending most of it talking with other Canadians in the room. We kept landing on the same thing: there was a lot of this energy in New York and San Francisco, and not much of it up north, even though Waterloo and Toronto are full of people building.

So I suggested we bring it home. That turned into Cafe Cursor in Waterloo and Toronto, and from there into running Cursor on campus at the University of Waterloo.

Cafe Cursor is a pop-up for people who build with Cursor: a room, coffee, and laptops open. I organized the Waterloo edition and the Toronto edition, handling the venue, the guest list and the run of the night, and wrote up a recap afterwards.

Freeform was the build night I ran on campus. There were no themes and no restrictions, just four hours to build something you actually care about. It opened with a live demo of building fast with Cursor, then everyone built, and everyone presented to the room at the end.

The prizes were meant to reward taste as much as polish: Most Whimsical, Most Useful, Best Hardware Hack, Most Artsy, Cursed Build, and Best Use of Cursor.

I wanted people to leave Freeform with something physical. So I built cursor-receipts: you open a page on your phone, type your name and what you're building, snap a photo, and a receipt with the Freeform logo, your project and your photo prints out a few seconds later.

It's a small Bun and TypeScript server that talks to a USB Epson thermal printer. The printer can only do black dots on a 576-pixel-wide strip, so every photo goes through a pipeline: sharp fixes the EXIF rotation from phone cameras and resizes to the printer width, then a Floyd–Steinberg dither turns grey into patterns of black and white dots so faces still read on paper. The result is packed into a 1-bit raster and sent as raw ESC/POS commands, followed by an auto-cut.

Jobs go into a queue that prints one receipt every 8 seconds, which keeps a room of people from jamming the printer at once. Since the printer is plugged into my laptop, I put it behind a Cloudflare tunnel so anyone at the event can print from their own phone, with a token check on every request so the link can't be abused once it's shared.