Organizing the Open Developer Meetup

At JPL, my coworker and I organized a monthly meetup for employees to share interesting open-source software that can be used for JPL projects.

An Idea...

To promote the Open Developer Meetup, we thought a website allowing presenters to share their knowledge via blog posts, like an internal Medium blogging site, would help in sharing the enthusiasm we had for open-source software.

We were heavily inspired by OpenAI's blog, and how each paper they publish has a visual poster attached:

We emulated that idea and we are generating unique cards for each talk! We have repurposed an amazing project by Luke Patton called Canvas Cards by randomly assigning different colors to a random card using a Node.js script we wrote.

Our website looks like:

As a fun user interaction, we are using vanilla-tilt.js, a vanilla JS library adding a tilt-on-hover effect:

This blog-like website is also special because we are using Git and MDX (special markdown) as our own Content Management System (CMS). The MDX spec is really interesting, and allows presenters to write JSX in Markdown allowing for importing custom components, interactive charts, etc. to be embedded in the blog post!