JOBS Workshop 2026 website

Source for the JOBS Workshop site — a half-day workshop for computer architecture PhD students and postdocs going on the job market, co-located with MICRO. Listed by MICRO-59 as JOBS — Accelerating Your Job Search.

Live site: https://comparchsa.github.io/jobs-workshop.github.io/

A plain Jekyll site built by GitHub Pages. No npm, no theme gem, no build step in CI — just Liquid templates, YAML, and one CSS file. Push to main and the site rebuilds in a minute or two.

All maintenance documentation lives in this file. The site itself contains no instructions for editing it.

---

The one thing to know

Almost every edit you will ever make is to a file in _data/.

The pages read from those YAML files and render whatever is in them. You should rarely need to touch a .html or .md file to change content.

Want to change…	Edit this
Dates, times, venue, application link, deadlines	_data/workshop.yml
The schedule, its speakers and panelists	_data/schedule.yml
The organizing committee	_data/organizers.yml
The selected job candidates	_data/candidates.yml
The tabs in the top nav	_data/navigation.yml
The archive of previous years	_data/past_editions.yml
Site title, description, URL	_config.yml

Every one of those files opens with a comment block explaining its fields.

---

Things to fill in before publishing

The site is complete but a few values are placeholders:

• contact_email in _data/workshop.yml is the literal string <placeholder>. Until it contains an @, the site prints it as plain text in a dashed box rather than a mailto link, so no dead address is published. Put the real address in and every occurrence becomes a working link on its own — see _includes/contact.html.
• submission.url is empty. Paste the HotCRP URL when the site is live.
• important_dates are all TBD except the workshop date itself.
• Schedule speakers are all TBD.
• venue_room is TBD until MICRO assigns it.

---

Common tasks

Turn on the job-candidate application

Applications run through HotCRP. In _data/workshop.yml:

submission:
  label: "Apply as a job candidate"
  url: "https://jobs2026.hotcrp.com/"
  hotcrp_name: "jobs2026.hotcrp.com"

While url is empty the button renders as a greyed-out "opens soon" chip instead of a dead link, so it is always safe to ship the page before HotCRP exists. Fill in the matching deadlines under important_dates at the same time.

Publish the selected candidates

After selection, add a block per candidate to _data/candidates.yml:

- name: Ada Lovelace
  affiliation: University of Virginia
  seeking: Academia          # free text; shown as a tag
  cv: https://example.org/ada-cv.pdf
  website: https://example.org/ada                     # optional
  research: Analytical engines and compiler design.    # optional, one line

Commit and push. The table on /candidates/ picks it up automatically. While the list is empty the page shows a "not published yet" panel rather than an empty table.

Confirm a speaker or panelist

In _data/schedule.yml, replace the TBD entry:

  people:
    - name: Jane Researcher
      affiliation: NVIDIA
      url: https://example.org/jane                 # optional
      role: Moderator                               # optional
      photo: /assets/img/speakers/jane-researcher.jpg   # optional

Photos. Drop square images (400×400 or larger is plenty) into assets/img/speakers/ and point photo: at them. Anyone without a photo gets a circle with their initials, so a partly-confirmed panel still looks deliberate — you can add photos one at a time as people send them.

Change the schedule itself

Every field in _data/schedule.yml is optional except title, so the file works at any stage of planning:

# Times not settled yet — just list the sessions
- kind: panel
  title: "Panel: Research careers in industry and academia"

# Times settled
- start: "08:15"
  end: "09:00"
  kind: panel
  title: "Panel: Research careers in industry and academia"

A slot with no start renders without a time on /schedule/ and shows "TBD" in the home-page summary. kind is one of panel, talk, break, or session and sets the word in the little chip above the title. Reordering entries reorders the page.

The note above the schedule comes from schedule_note in _data/workshop.yml; set it to "" to hide it once the program is final.

Update the organizing committee

_data/organizers.yml — order in the file is order on the page. Photos work the same way as for speakers, in assets/img/organizers/. Two extra options exist for the awkward cases:

• initials: overrides the letters derived from the name, for entries that are not a person ("CASA" rather than the "CS" that would be derived).
• photo_fit: contain fits a logo whole inside the circle on a white disc, instead of cropping it to fill like a face. The CASA Steering Group uses it.

For faces, photo_position and photo_zoom control the framing — see the comment block at the top of _includes/avatar.html.

Add a page

1. Create newpage.md at the repo root with front matter:

   ---
   title: New Page
   subtitle: One line under the heading.   # optional
   permalink: /newpage/
   ---

   Note that front matter is not processed as Liquid — {{ }} in title or subtitle will render literally.

2. Add it to _data/navigation.yml with a url that matches the permalink exactly, slashes included.

The page layout is applied automatically (see defaults in _config.yml), so you only write the body.

---

Rolling the site over to the next edition

Ten minutes of work, in this order:

1. Archive the edition that just ended. Add an entry to the top of _data/past_editions.yml — year, conference, date, location, a short summary, and the highlights.
2. Update _data/workshop.yml — edition, dates, venue, co-located conference and its URLs, important dates; reset submission.url to "" and restore schedule_note.
3. Reset _data/schedule.yml to a skeleton with TBD speakers.
4. Update _data/organizers.yml for the new committee.
5. Empty _data/candidates.yml — keep the comment header, delete the entries.
6. Update title in _config.yml to the new year.
7. Update the calendar: block in _data/workshop.yml — the .ics times are UTC and do not derive themselves from the dates above.
8. Regenerate assets/img/social-card.png (1200x630) so link previews show the right year.

Nothing else needs to change. The prose on the pages reads years, venues, and conference names out of _data rather than hard-coding them.

---

Previewing locally

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload
# → http://127.0.0.1:4000/jobs-workshop.github.io/

Note the /jobs-workshop.github.io/ suffix — that is the baseurl, and it is part of the local URL too.

_config.yml is the only file Jekyll does not hot-reload; restart the server after editing it.

If you would rather not install Ruby, editing YAML directly in the GitHub web UI is perfectly fine — GitHub Pages builds it and emails you if something breaks.

---

Deployment and URLs

Served from the main branch by GitHub Pages, under Settings → Pages → Source: Deploy from a branch.

Because the repository lives under the comparchsa organization rather than a user or org literally named jobs-workshop, the published URL is a project page:

https://comparchsa.github.io/jobs-workshop.github.io/

which is why _config.yml sets:

url:     https://comparchsa.github.io
baseurl: /jobs-workshop.github.io

Moving to a custom domain later (e.g. jobsworkshop.org):

1. Add a CNAME file at the repo root containing just the bare domain.
2. Set url: to https://jobsworkshop.org and baseurl: to "".
3. Point DNS at GitHub Pages and enable HTTPS in Settings → Pages.

All internal links go through Jekyll's relative_url filter, so they follow baseurl automatically — you do not have to hunt through the templates.

---

Layout of the repository

_config.yml            site-wide settings
_data/                 ← all the content you actually edit
_includes/
  nav.html             top navigation bar
  footer.html          footer
  cta.html             the job-candidate application buttons
  contact.html         the organizers' address, or the placeholder
  avatar.html          one person's photo, or their initials in a circle
  organizer-grid.html  the committee card grid (used on 2 pages)
_layouts/
  default.html         html skeleton: head, nav, main, footer
  page.html            default.html + the page title band
index.html             home page (hero + sections)
schedule.md            timeline rendered from _data/schedule.yml
candidates.md          how to apply + table from _data/candidates.yml
organizers.md          committee grid, panelist nominations, contact
venue.md               venue, travel, registration, accessibility
past-editions.md       archive from _data/past_editions.yml (footer link only)
404.html               shown for any unknown URL
calendar.ics           generates /jobs-workshop-2026.ics from workshop.yml
assets/img/social-card.png   1200x630 link preview image
assets/css/style.css   every style on the site, one file, plain CSS
assets/js/site.js      the mobile nav toggle — the only JS on the site

Restyling

The palette is Tokyo Night Light, the VS Code theme. Surfaces and text come from the theme's own JSON; --brand and --accent are its link-blue and purple syntax colours.

The site is light-only, on purpose. There is no @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) block, and html { color-scheme: light } stops dark-mode browsers from auto-darkening scrollbars and form controls. If you add a dark block back, anyone whose OS is set to dark mode will stop seeing the light palette entirely — which is exactly the trap this note exists to prevent.

All colours are CSS custom properties in the single :root at the top of assets/css/style.css. There are four surface levels: --surface (cards, tables, header), --bg (page canvas), --bg-soft (banded sections, page headers), and --bg-sunken (footer). --text and --text-muted are the two text tones.

The palette is checked against WCAG 2.1 AA: every text/background pair is at least 4.5:1, and control outlines are at least 3:1. If you change a colour, re-check it — https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ takes about ten seconds per pair.

Accessibility

The site is built to WCAG 2.1 AA. What is already in place:

• One <h1> per page and no skipped heading levels.
• <header>, <nav>, <main>, <footer> landmarks, a skip-to-content link, and aria-current="page" on the active tab.
• Visible focus outlines on every interactive element. The mobile menu is a real <button> with aria-expanded; Esc closes it and returns focus to the button rather than dropping focus to the top of the page.
• The candidate table sits in a tabindex="0" role="region" box, so it can be scrolled sideways with the keyboard on a narrow screen. Keep those attributes on any scrollable box you add — without them the content is unreachable without a mouse.
• Decorative images carry alt=""; the initials circles are aria-hidden, so names are announced once, not twice.
• Table headers use scope, and the candidate table has a caption.
• Dates and session times are wrapped in <time datetime="...">.
• Text sizes are in rem, so browser zoom and OS font-size settings work.
• Wide content scrolls inside its own box; the page body never scrolls sideways, down to a 320px-wide screen.
• Honours prefers-reduced-motion and forced-colors (Windows High Contrast).
• The site is fully readable with JavaScript disabled.

When adding content, the three things that break this most often: an image without alt, a link whose text is "here" or "click here", and a heading level skipped for visual reasons. Style headings with CSS instead of picking a smaller tag.

---

Credits

Organized by CASA, the Computer Architecture Student Association. All participants are expected to follow the SIGARCH CARES policies.

The original scaffolding came from the pages-themes/minimal Jekyll theme (CC0), by way of PLTea and the CASA ArchChat site — thanks to Rachit and everyone there. See LICENSE.