Client Compass Detroit Role Engineering Lead Period January 2025 to present Stack Astro, React, Sanity, n8n, Playwright
Most deadlines are negotiable. You get to the end of a sprint, something is not ready, and it moves. Everyone grumbles and life continues.
Event dates do not work like that. The venue is booked. The speakers booked flights. The registration link is already sitting in a few hundred calendar invites. If a feature is not ready on the day, it does not slip to next sprint. It does not happen.
Since January 2025 I have led engineering for Compass Detroit, a Detroit technology organization that runs regional innovation summits, the state’s Google Developer Group conference, and a public hackathon. Six event platforms so far, and I have designed and built all of them.
The platforms
Michigan DevFest
November 2026 · Little Caesars Resource Center · Detroit
Michigan GDG's major annual conference. Our 2025 edition was the largest in the group's history, attracting over 600 live attendees. My work on that site continued and we improved the product through 2026. Today's site is the result of that ongoing collaboration. Dark theme with a gold primary color. midevfest.com
Black History Month Innovation Summit
February 2026 · hosted by DTE Energy · Detroit
This was our first rebuild and it holds many of the same characteristics of the 2025 Michigan DevFest site. Here we started to rebuild the location component. We refactored most of the components from the 2025 DevFest site. Site was built in light mode only. I took on lead role for this build working with two other engineers and three student volunteers. bhmsummit.com
Two experienced engineers from Chicago joined our crew. One had a student protégé and I assumed he was talented. I allowed him select the hero feature component to build. It was a mistake. His work was below par. And because he lived in Africa, it was difficult for me to coach him. We didn’t have anyone else to do it so I stepped in to finish the build. At the time, the solution was good enough to launch.
International Women’s Day Innovation Summit
March 28, 2026 · Little Caesars Resource Center · Detroit
Second in the summit series. Shares the content model underneath, all content components received a major overhaul. Accessibility was an issue for the website due to one developer who makes questionable color contrast choices. The overall product was a great step forward and we'll continue to fix bugs and add improvements over time.
A colleague generated the video for the hero. People were inspired by the team's versatility.
Hack Michigan
May 15 to 17, 2026 · Hosted by TechTown Detroit, with Compass Detroit as the presenting sponsor
I led this build opting for Astro and React with a stunning Three-js full site background animation. I worked with one other engineer. We added Playwright for end-to-end testing and improved accessibility. This added time to the build but it was worth it. Hackathons are a major feature of Compass Detroit. It was a three day event attracting over 100 attendees. It carries a full schedule, the challenge brief, judging criteria, eligibility rules, and a sponsor system with five tiers. Closer to an application than a website. hackmichigan.com
In this event we promoted a public hackathon where teams build AI proof-of-concepts for Michigan industries: manufacturing, agriculture, mobility, sustainability.
Detroit Pride Innovation Summit
June 2026 · IBM HQ · Detroit
The one build where I was on the program as well as behind it. I gave a talk called "Eight Surprising Facts about Web Accessibility" at this event. It was well received. Attendees were surprised to learn that fixing web accessibility had a direct impact on the bottom line. detroitpridesummit.com
Attendees were soothed by the bejeweled rainbow animated hero.
Latin Heritage Month Innovation Summit
September 2026 · Wayne State University
This event is coming together last minute with just two weeks to go. We're using the same content model as the other summits but we're building a new site from our product baseline. Much of the content is managed in Sanity CMS, so year after year this site becomes easier to maintain. hhmsummit.com
Most of the sites were built in dark mode, due to customer request. Soon I’ll also add a light mode option, starting with the Latin Heritage event and as we continue updating other sites, create it for all.
Six identities, approaching one thing underneath
Building six event sites one at a time means iterating over the success of the previous site, improving upon the product. Same registration flow, same speaker grid, same sponsor tiers. Each build becomes easier to maintain as we move towards a headless CMS powered product series. In future sites, we’ll integrate from the series but not iterate over a previous site to the next one. Primarily because we now have the product that the client loves and it serves the needs of the audience.
So the series shares one content model and one deployment path, and spends its variation where the audience actually notices it, which is the identity. A visitor to the Pride summit and a visitor to Hack Michigan should feel like they are in two different places. The people maintaining them should feel like they are in one.
Content lives in Sanity. Structured schemas feed React components, which means event content gets edited rather than deployed. Nobody has to open a pull request to fix a speaker’s job title.
Deployment runs on n8n. Publish an update in Sanity and the orchestration handles the build and the notifications. Content ships without an engineer in the loop, which is the only reason this scales past two sites. We may try alternative deployment paths, such as running scripts in Google Sheets or running a scraping pipeline to update the site.
Accessibility is enforced in CI. Playwright and @axe-core run against components before anything reaches production. A WCAG failure breaks the build, so it gets fixed while someone is still looking at that code. We’re also testing with the Polypane accessibility browser, built in Electron.
Performance gets attention up front. Inspiring animation for machines that can handle it, static images for mobile. SVG maps, cleaned-up asset handling, structural work on the markup. Event traffic does not arrive evenly. It spikes on announcement day and again the morning of, mostly on phones, often on conference wifi.
We’ve pushed updates to the site even in the middle of an event. Whether a speaker dropped due to unforeseen circumstances or changing tracks, even fixing DNS records due to the site being blocked by a client firewall, anything is possible. That’s where having an agile team is the success to our deliverable.
What I do there
A colleague in GDG Detroit reached out to me to help in 2025 and I never looked back. Originally we were lead by a fellow GDG Toledo engineer, but he stepped back and I filled the role. I'm now the Engineering Lead since January 2025. I set technical direction across the platforms, do the design and the build, run review and pull requests, and mentor student developers from University of Michigan-Dearborn and Wayne State who contribute to the projects.
