Open Source North

Open Source North is an annual tech conference in Minneapolis focused on open-source technology — around 1,400 attendees this year, with sponsors like IBM, Target, US Bank, and Confluent. Through my consulting company, SDG, I led the redevelopment of opensourcenorth.com, migrating it from WordPress to Strapi with an Astro/React front-end, and I’ve maintained it since.

Why Move Off WordPress

SDG specializes in JavaScript development, not WordPress, and it showed: the conference director regularly struggled to update content, and every design change was harder than it should have been. Moving to a stack we actually specialize in meant the site could be picked up and maintained by anyone on our JavaScript practice, not just whoever happened to know WordPress’s quirks.

Strapi + Astro/React

Strapi decouples the content from the site entirely, so the two can be updated independently — a content change doesn’t require touching the codebase, and a redesign doesn’t require touching content. Rebuilding the front-end in Astro and React also gave us a chance to improve performance and add UX the old site couldn’t easily support, including an interactive schedule, with the ability to save talks planned for next year.

Ongoing Maintenance

I’ve maintained the site through two conferences since launch — mostly minor feature additions, infrastructure upkeep, and the occasional troubleshooting session. Once the initial build was done, it settled into roughly 10 hours of work a year.