yorkdevelopers.org

Developer meetups and tech events in York, UK, presented as a man page.

How it works

• groups.yml lists the groups. Each one names where it posts events: a Meetup page, an Eventbrite organiser page, or any iCal feed.
• scripts/fetch-events.mjs reads those listings and writes src/data/events.json (upcoming) and src/data/past.json (history).
• Astro builds the static site into dist/.
• .github/workflows/deploy.yml does both on every push and twice a day, deploys to GitHub Pages, and commits the refreshed event data back to the repo.

Finished events never show as upcoming: the build drops them, and the page hides any that end between builds.

Events from groups we don't list

scripts/discover.mjs searches Meetup's tech events near York and Luma events within a few miles of York for anything that isn't from a group in groups.yml. What it finds is not published. It goes on a GitHub issue labelled event-candidates, where each event has two tick boxes:

• Add to site publishes that one event.
• Ignore dismisses it.

Ticking a box runs .github/workflows/review-candidates.yml, which records the decision and rebuilds the site. Only people who can edit issues in this repo can tick the boxes. If an organiser keeps turning up, add them to groups.yml instead.

Eventbrite blocks automated access to its search pages, so Eventbrite organisers have to be added to groups.yml by hand.

News headlines

scripts/fetch-news.mjs reads the feeds in news.yml and keeps headlines that read as tech stories about York. Nobody reviews these, so the test is strict. To tune it:

• Drop a kind of story: add a word or phrase to block in news.yml.
• Add or remove a feed: edit sources in news.yml.
• Change what counts as tech: edit the TECH list at the top of scripts/fetch-news.mjs.

When something goes wrong

• One source is unreachable: the run carries on with a warning and keeps that group's last known events.
• Every source is unreachable: the run fails and GitHub emails whoever last edited the workflow. The last good site stays up.
• The site hasn't refreshed for two days: the home page shows a warning above the events.

Common jobs

• Add a group: add an entry to groups.yml.
• Add an event that isn't on a listed source: add it to events.yml.
• Retire a group: set retired: true on its entry.
• Help the filter find a group: add words to its tags.
• Change the link preview image: edit scripts/og.svg, then run node -e "require('sharp')('scripts/og.svg').png().toFile('public/og.png')".

Run it locally

npm install
npm run fetch   # optional: refresh events
npm run dev