Another year, another IndieWebCamp San Diego in the books — this was our 3rd annual get-together, and it didn’t disappoint.
Photos from the weekend are up in a gallery (still waiting on a few attendee approvals before it’s fully public, so bear with me). I’ll be adding captions and slugs to the individual photos, plus links to a couple of photography tutorials that came out of the weekend — one on getting a cooler angle on portraits (shoutout to Joe for that one), and another on Lightroom editing basics. I’m also looking at adding a lightbox to the gallery so it’s easier to browse.
Social events
Thursday night kicked things off with comedy — two rounds of Red Light and a bit that’s now permanently lodged in my brain as “Godot’s pistol.” You had to be there.
Friday was a photo walk followed by drinks, which is exactly the right order of operations for a group of people who all care a little too much about getting the shot.
Day 1
We started with intros and lunch, then made a location change partway through the day. Sessions covered a good spread of topics: personal libraries, thinking about past vs. future of the IndieWeb, and photos — which tied in nicely with the photo walk the night before.
Day 2
Day 2 opened with a session on design tips, working through David’s photo data as a case study.
Then came the session I was most excited about: microformats. Gregor walked through setting up a toolchain, and Thomas shared some really useful visual references. Microformats turned out to be so useful that my planned transition from Astro to Eleventy is on hold indefinitely — Eleventy might still have better native RSS support, but I may end up ditching RSS generation entirely and letting Granary handle translation from microformats-enabled pages instead. (I might still make the jump to Eleventy someday, mostly for the syntactic sweetness of Web Components over the verbosity of JSX and MDX.)
After that was Micropub: Anthony walked through his Sparkles setup, and Benji covered issue tracking. We had to skip media endpoints, which was fine since I’ve been prototyping my own custom image uploader that handles multiple aspect ratios anyway. Eventually I’ll need to set up collections in Astro to make use of it, plus wire up the microformats feed as another dependency so I can throw different post types into it — photos, articles, and whatever new post types come out of Sparkles.
A few other demos rounded out the day. There’s a great photo of Anthony looking at a slide Joe recommended, and Joe also wrote a related article that’s stuck with me since:
So much in software we talk about code and frameworks, but ultimately all this code depends on human effort.
To close things out, I gave David a ride home and he told me about Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — apparently “EV Zoomies” are a real, documented phenomenon. Ten out of ten, would drive an EV enthusiast home again.
Thanks to everyone who came out and made this year’s IndieWebCamp San Diego a good one. See you at the next one.