Open Budget Oakland: Static-Site Migration and Automated Deployment

Modernizing a site that volunteers were afraid to touch led to more features shipping faster.

Client

OpenOakland (volunteer, since 2015)

Date

June 2021 – November 2021

Technologies

React.js, D3.js, Eleventy, Pug, Node.js, GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages

The Open Budget Oakland website was built on Harp, a static-site generator that was intimidating to non-technical staff and, even worse, had been abandoned by its developer. The all-volunteer project was left stranded on an obsolete codebase, and their manual deployment procedure did nothing to help the situation. My first move was to migrate the site to a well-maintained front-end stack: Eleventy with Pug templates. Then I set up GitHub Actions to automate the whole release process with a CI/CD workflow. As a result, volunteers were free to focus on content creation and feature addition, which is, of course, exactly what they signed up for.