TampaDevs | Devpost

Inspiration

Tampa Devs was inspired by Orlando Devs, the community I started with when I started my coding career. Since I moved to a new city, the community hasn't been the same

I created Tampa Devs as a result

I wrote about the whole "why I started it" here in this blog post:

https://www.vincentntang.com/why-i-started-tampa-devs/

What it does

It's built on eleventyJS, a SSG (static site generator). It's the first-ever media marketing website I built.

How I built it

I captured a lot of raw footage and produced what you see here, and hosted a few events to get there.

Everything was either recorded on my pixel phone or a GoPro 8

Some timelapse videos were shot and I had a video editor compile the results. I added max compression to the video so logos and assets would appear more in focus on top.

Also for performance reasons as well

Challenges I ran into

Ran into some issues understanding 11ty.js. It uses convention over configuration, so everything has to be named properly. I misspelled a file and called it talk.json instead of talks.json and that took a whole day to debug and figure out why it wasn't compiling

The other big challenge was scaling Tampa Devs via marketing. I wrote a blog post about it: https://www.vincentntang.com/how-we-grew-tampa-devs/

Lastly, there's always some weird issues with Safari. It doesn't work the same on iOS vs MacOS for instance. AutoPlay is disabled and I still can't figure out why it won't auto-play when audio is disabled

I also learned many lessons on leadership too, related to letting other volunteer have ownership into Tampa Devs. Read about it here: https://www.vincentntang.com/write-how-to-guides/