SBCB Tech Catch-ups

Hosted at: https://khalidlab.github.io/tech_catch_ups/

A lightweight, searchable knowledge base for our weekly informal software/computing catch-ups. The site is built with Material for MkDocs and deployed to GitHub Pages with GitHub Actions.

What goes here?

Each meeting gets one Markdown file under docs/meetings/. Notes should briefly capture:

• the video, talk, demo, or resource we watched/discussed;
• the main points from the discussion;
• useful technical takeaways and advice;
• links to documentation, papers, repositories, wikis, or follow-up material;
• relevant tags so the archive remains easy to search and browse.

Repository layout

.
├── .github/workflows/deploy.yml  # Build and deploy GitHub Pages
├── docs/
│   ├── index.md                  # Site home page
│   ├── tags.md                   # Generated tag index
│   └── meetings/
│       ├── .nav.yml              # spec for mkdocs-awesome-nav
│       ├── index.md              # Meeting archive landing page
│       ├── TEMPLATE.md           # Copy this for a new meeting
│       └── 2026-10-08-example.md # Example meeting note
├── .gitignore
├── CONTRIBUTING.md               # Contribution conventions
├── mkdocs.yml                    # MkDocs configuration
└── requirements.txt              # Python dependencies

Add a new meeting

1. Copy docs/meetings/TEMPLATE.md to a file named YYYY-MM-DD-short-topic.md.

2. Fill in the front matter and replace the placeholder sections.

3. Choose tags from the tag vocabulary in docs/index.md. Add a new tag only when it represents a genuinely reusable topic.

4. Preview locally and submit your change through the normal Git/GitHub workflow.

Example:

cp docs/meetings/TEMPLATE.md docs/meetings/2026-10-15-python-profiling.md

Run locally

Python 3.11+ is recommended.

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate          # Windows: .venv\\Scripts\\activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
mkdocs serve

Open the local URL printed by MkDocs (normally http://127.0.0.1:8000/).

To run the same strict build used in CI:

mkdocs build --strict

Publish with GitHub Pages

The workflow in .github/workflows/deploy.yml builds the site on pushes to main and deploys the generated site/ directory with GitHub Pages Actions.

After pushing the repository to GitHub:

1. Open Settings → Pages.
2. Under Build and deployment, set Source to GitHub Actions.
3. Push to main (or run the workflow manually from the Actions tab).

Editing conventions

• Keep notes concise and useful rather than attempting verbatim minutes.
• Prefer durable, primary links such as official documentation and project repositories.
• Use descriptive link text rather than raw URLs where possible.
• Use the existing tag vocabulary consistently.
• Do not include confidential, personal, or otherwise non-shareable discussion in a public repository.

GenAI use disclosure

The starting templates and structure for this repository were generated using ChatGPT 5.6 (https://chatgpt.com, EDU Licence, Medium effort mode). Starting from that template, the repository is edited, updated and curated by humans.