In the spirit of rebuilding & relaunching things while on holiday, today I rebuilt Edinburgh2. I’ve owned the edinburgh2.com domain for over ten years but the original site was looking a little tired and unloved: time for an update!

When I first registered the domain I had a grand vision that it could become the online home of the Edinburgh Tech Scene: a list of meetups, a blog aggregator, a jobs board, a discussion forum, the list goes on.

With all of that in mind, some spare time, a desire take a look at AWS’s Elastic Beanstalk, and a fresh new blog to write a post create content for I set off to iterate on Edinburgh2.

Iteration 0: Reproduce existing functionality

All of Edinburgh2 was previously a single static page hosted on S3. I knew that wouldn’t cut it in the medium term, so started with a fresh Django project (I know Django very well and wanted to ship something in a day) and rebuilt the meetups page. From there I rewrote the styles from scratch, including some CSS media queries & grid layouts. Finally I used some vim macros to translate the existing HTML into Django fixtures to complete “Iteration 0”.

Iteration 1: Add employers

Next I knew that I wanted to add an “Employers” page, which is, in my mind, the MVP ¹ of what will be a jobs-board. Ultimately I’d like to have recruiters keep their own profiles and job-posts up-to-date.

When I was looking for my first software job in Edinburgh after graduating, I found Andrew Birkett’s list of Edinburgh Software Companies extremely useful, but I didn’t want to just replicate that. So I’ve only added a few examples of companies I know around Edinburgh doing interesting things: maybe someone will find it useful (let me know if it’s you!)

And of course if you would like your meetup or company added to (or removed from) the lists, let me know!

Super Duper–VHS