Here’s a rough timeline of how Converge was made. More specifically, the landing page and shop. (the logistics etc. of running a YSWS are super interesting too IMO, but that’s not really a SOM thing 😅)

Landing page

First step was designing the site in Figma:

(time tracked in figma-wakatime by the way, go check it out!)

It does look a fair bit different to the live site (that’s design for ya)

I went through a ton of iterations (different copy! different font! more use of colour! different design elements!). I encourage you to look at the version control history in Figma: https://www.figma.com/design/mbzJHCEW33WlDGMNRKFWrE/Converge?node-id=0-1&t=THvRetCYw96jwqlG-1.

Emporium (Converge shop)

The first version was made with Ruby on Rails. Rails is a fantastic framework! However, I was running into issues with Slack authentication (turns out the omniauth-slack library was broken for years…), and I was under time pressure, so I ended up switching to SvelteKit instead. That worked great!

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Using Rails yourself? The omniauth-slack-openid gem does work! That being said, the repo has a grand total of three GitHub stars, so take that for what you will

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Here’s the live version of Emporium:

(Not pretty, I know, but I made this at 3:30am and I wanted to get something released :pf:)

Amongst other things, Emporium has a really useful admin view for things like orders:

Here are a few cool things you can do on the admin view:

• Auto-send emails via Loops.so (what HC uses for emails) for fulfillment or rejections
• Set notes for orders, that are visible for both users and admins, for things like HCB grant links