The reason
Everything started with a simple tweet
@mihcall is there any site with the list of upcoming conferences in Poland?
— Konrad Kokosa (@konradkokosa) November 4, 2015Ideas
I am almost sure that when you think about such site you just included:
- server side technology
- front-end framework
- database
- hosting
- git
- …
We also had a long discussion on Tweeter about technologies (from golang to .NET), databases (like rethinkDB), etc.
Real needs
Send here a moment and think what do we need to present. My idea accepted by others (Konrad Kokosa, Michał Śliwoń and Marcin Biegała) was to create a simple web page with one table containing following information:
- conference name
- localization (city/country)
- conference date
- CFP final date
- CFP link
- optional tags for easier search
- optional search box (because we can replace it by CTRL+F in browser)
Technologies
Sum up of above idea can be: static webpage. For layout we decided to use bootstrap and bootstrap table component. Konrad did it a simple page with a JSON file (for date) in one evening. For source control we used github, and for hosting github pages. Because the only database we have is plain JSON file. After 2 or 3 days we decide to have one JSON per CFP and use Jekyll to merge it into final one JSON file - it is much easier to maintain.
MVP
The funny thing is that instead of “huge” project we created 100% useful page. Exactly what we all understand as Minimum Viable Product. Now we can go we new ideas like: RSS feed, icon/image, more user friendly process of adding CFP, etc.
If you have an idea just visit http://cfp.help/ or https://github.com/callForPapers/callForPapers.github.io/ and propose it :)
@cover by http://blog.fastmonkeys.com/