Michigan DevFest 2026 is live—and it feels good to have something real for the community to look at while the rest of the weekend takes shape. The site is open for Save the Date, early sponsor conversations, and the first chapter of this year’s story. Behind the scenes, we’re still moving hard-coded content into Sanity CMS, with n8n lined up to pull approved speakers from a spreadsheet so nobody has to hand-format another roster file.
What’s on the site today
This year’s gathering is Michigan DevFest & AI Hackathon, November 13–14, 2026, with DevFest hosted at the Little Caesars Global Resource Center (LCRC) in Detroit—powered by Compass Detroit and Little Caesars, alongside GDG Detroit.
Registration isn’t open yet, and that’s okay. Right now the homepage leans into Save the Date and Become a Sponsor, plus the venue and schedule anchors you’ll want bookmarked. Sessions and speakers still show the 2025 lineup as a friendly stand-in, so folks can picture what a DevFest day feels like until the 2026 roster is confirmed and flowing through the CMS.
Shipping the shell early was a deliberate choice. Waiting for a perfect content model would have kept the page dark for months. Getting it live gives partners, speakers, and attendees something concrete—and it puts the next work in plain view: stop treating event data like a one-off formatting chore.
Partners, and a hackathon of its own
Expect the site to keep changing as relationships do. We’ll roll in our latest partners as those conversations turn into commitments—logos, tiers, and shout-outs landing when they’re ready, not held back for a single “final” drop.
We’re also planning to announce a separate location for the AI Hackathon. It won’t share the DevFest venue at LCRC. When that space is locked, it’ll get its own callout on the site so builders know where to show up for the hackathon side of the weekend.
Why we’re moving off hard-coded data
Past DevFest sites (including work I documented for 2025) meant updating and reformatting a file whenever the roster shifted. That works until bios duplicate, headshots drift, and only someone comfortable in the repo can ship a fix.
We’re heading the same direction we took for other Compass event properties—structured content in Sanity, organizers in tools they already use, automation in the middle. The Pride Innovation Summit write-up, From Spreadsheet to Stage, is the closest sibling: Sheets as the runner’s master list, Sanity as the site’s source of truth, n8n as the bridge.
For DevFest 2026 we’re aiming for the same calm:
Migrate remaining hard-coded content into Sanity so partners, team, pages, and eventually the 2026 sessions and speakers can update without a developer touching source.
Import approved speakers from a spreadsheet via n8n, instead of hand-transferring rows into CMS fields or dressing up another JS/JSON blob.
Once that pipeline is humming, organizers keep the approved list where programming already lives. Import upserts into Sanity. The site presents from the CMS—not from a file that only ships when someone merges a PR. That’s especially handy when partners arrive in waves and the hackathon venue needs its own announce moment.
What’s left (and why it matters)
A few workstreams sit between “site is up” and “we can breathe”:
More data into Sanity — finish lifting what is still hard-coded so Studio (and deploy hooks) own what attendees actually read—including room to grow the partner board as deals close.
n8n speaker sync — take the approved spreadsheet roster and publish it into Sanity idempotently, so late adds, drops, and bio tweaks don’t restart a copy-paste marathon.
Hackathon venue — lock and publish the separate AI Hackathon location when it’s ready.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is how you keep a community conference honest while the lineup, the sponsors, and even the map are still settling months before the doors open.
Same pattern, different weekend
If you’ve read Sanity, n8n, and Hack Michigan, you’ll recognize the theme: put structure in the CMS, put repeatable publish steps in automation, and keep Git/Vercel for people who should own the platform—not every content change.
DevFest’s twist is the spreadsheet-first speaker workflow. Event runners already filter proposals, confirm speakers, and track tracks in Sheets. Meeting them there—then promoting clean documents into Sanity—beats asking them to learn another editorial surface under deadline pressure.
DevFest venue: Little Caesars Global Resource Center, Detroit
AI Hackathon venue: coming soon (separate from DevFest)
I’ll share more as the Sanity migration, partner updates, and n8n speaker import land—and when we can point you to the hackathon address. Until then: save the date, keep an eye out for registration, and if your organization belongs at Michigan’s DevFest table, we’d love to talk early.
