San Antonio Startup + Tech Week

Conference Platform

The public site and staff portal for the 11th San Antonio Startup + Tech Week, built for Geekdom: five days and five tracks, Sept 28 – Oct 2, 2026.

Client: Geekdom
Timeline: 2026
Role: Lead Developer & Designer · Freelance
Links: Live site Source

Context

Startup + Tech Week is Geekdom’s citywide conference, and Geekdom needed one platform for everyone involved: the public registering, speakers and sponsors applying, and the staff running the week. As a freelancer, I designed the event’s visual assets and built the platform, from the public site to the staff admin and the branded screens in each room.

What I built

–Public site with registration, speaker, sponsor, and host forms, validated and bot-protected, each with a branded confirmation email
–Staff admin with Geekdom-only sign-in, a speaker review workflow, and content management for sessions, speakers, sponsors, and partners
–One-tap check-in on event days, safe to repeat
–Custom branded screens for the in-room TVs
–The event’s visual assets and front-end design system

One source

This codebase runs the public site, staff admin, branded TV screens, .ics calendar, branded email, OG images, and sitemap + llms.txt.

Stack

Framework: Next.js 16 App Router · React 19 server components
Server: Admin SDK session cookies · Geekdom-only sign-in · proxy guarding /admin
API: Route handlers for registration and sponsor + host intake · server actions for check-in · zod + BotID on every public form
Data: Firestore · Vercel Blob for images · Firebase Storage for video
Runtime: Vercel · 5-minute revalidation carries admin edits across the site · weekly registration digest cron

Design

I designed the visual assets around one premise: five tracks, one current. Each track is a circuit with its own color, and every circuit runs on the same system of black, white, and one magenta, with a darker magenta ink wherever text has to meet contrast. The bolt in the hero isn’t a picture of electricity. A WebGL shader runs a current through it toward the cursor, and it settles into a still mark for anyone who asks for less motion.