HTML Day 2026 — Ryan McGovern

How Hampton Roads HTML Day happened

Hampton Roads HTML Day started because a friend wanted to put her poetry online.

We went through the usual options, Bear Blog, WordPress, static site generators, before finally landing on Neocities. I could help her get started there, but maintaining the site would mean learning at least a little HTML and CSS.

FreeCodeCamp covered a lot, but I wanted to find her something closer to the IndieWeb vibe. That search led me to HTML Energy. It wasn't remotely the learning resource I'd gone looking for. What it did have was a page about HTML Day, an annual event celebrated by groups around the world. The next one was August 8th, only a few months away.

That was enough for me to message Chazona, my friend and regular cohost: "Hey, I found this site called HTML Energy and these global HTML Day events they've been facilitating. Want to cohost one with me?"

She was onboard immediately.

The friend with the poetry didn't make it to the event. She reached out a few days beforehand to apologize. She didn't give a reason, I didn't ask for one. By then, the spirit of her question had already been picked up by others.

We were planning it as it happened

There was never a point when Chazona and I sat down with a complete plan for HTML Day. We picked a date, started telling people about it, and dealt with each missing piece as it became impossible to ignore.

Breakfast solved itself before we had even decided whether to serve food. I mentioned the event to Paul Chin Jr., who responded with the kind of immediate enthusiasm Paul brings to most things. First he said he would be there. A few days later, he came back with pastries and coffee sponsored by Val Town.

The venue came together almost as quickly. ECPI kept coming up while I asked around for space, and I happened to be interviewing there at the time. That gave me a path to the vice president of the Virginia Beach campus, who offered us a room with very little fuss.

All of a sudden we had a date, a room, and breakfast. We also had no idea whether enough people would show up to justify any of it.

Online promotion got us part of the way there. We posted to Discord, Slack, Meetup, and social media. Paul suggested local subreddits. Chazona made some killer flyers, got the group's feedback, and then the two of us set out to cover Hampton Roads.

We had badly misunderstood the size of Hampton Roads.

Norfolk alone took an entire day. Nothing else we did for the event came close to the amount of time and physical effort those flyers required. Next time, I want people in the neighboring cities to take a stack and cover their own part of the region. Two people can't casually flyer seven cities, no matter how reasonable the plan sounds from behind a laptop.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Chazona pointed out that our 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM event ran straight through lunch. Once breakfast was covered, the lack of lunch became a little more obvious.

Kevin and Linda from RevolutionVA and 757dev didn't hesitate. We reached out, explained the situation, and they immediately offered to sponsor lunch.

Written down like this, the whole thing sounds suspiciously easy. It wasn't. We could move that quickly because Hampton Roads has an active tech community, and we were leaning on relationships built through years of meetups, introductions, favors, and people showing up for each other. Without that history, I don't know that we could have put the day together so quickly.

Celebrating HTML meant actually using HTML

We marketed the event as AI-free, but this was never an anti-AI declaration or a purity test. I use AI heavily in my everyday life. The running joke was that we couldn't frisk anyone for contraband AI, but we preferred they leave it at home.

For four hours, we wanted to celebrate HTML by writing it. The good parts, the bad parts, and the odd little pitfalls you only meet when you work with it directly were all part of the point. Having an agent jump from prompt to finished page would have skipped the experience we had invited people to share.

That didn't mean dropping beginners in front of an empty text file with no help. Paul made First Page, an HTML Writing Lab that guided children through each step and explained what it was doing. It offered a way in without quietly making the whole site for them.

The moment after the presentation

I arrived about an hour early. I had printed the last batch of flyers before confirming the room number, so I hastily scrawled it in a couple places on a couple flyers and posted them at the doors. Upstairs, I checked the presentation, put some information on the whiteboard, and tried to get my nerves under control.

The pastries and coffee ran a little late (I forgive you Paul 😂), pushing our start to around 10:15 and giving me one more good excuse to panic.

Public speaking has never come naturally to me, so I've been making myself do more of it recently. This talk went surprisingly smoothly. I could tell I was speeding up near the end, but it never turned into the disaster my nerves had prepared me for.

Before I knew it, the presentation ended. There were probably only a few seconds before people got started, but nerves are good at stretching a few seconds into a much bigger thing. From the front of the room, it felt like everyone was looking at me like, "Now what?"

That transition was the part I hadn't known how to plan. We had invited everyone to write HTML, and now they had the freedom to do exactly that. A blank page hits differently when fifty people around you have blank pages of their own.

I wasn't running the room alone. Chazona and Austin were cohosting with me, and Paul brought his usual unmatched energy. A few people started making things, the room breathed a little easier, and everyone else followed.

People kept arriving throughout the day. Some left, but we ended with more people than we started with. Roughly fifty attendees passed through the room, and by the end quite a few seemed pleasantly surprised by how quickly the four hours had gone.

Every site got a cheer

We spent the last hour or two helping people publish the pages they were happy with.

When the first site went live, Paul led the room in a cheer. Someone else published, and the room did it again. Soon every new site got its own celebration.

Publishing something you made can feel strangely vulnerable, especially when it's your first site and the whole thing is visibly yours. The cheers changed that. Each person who published made it a little easier for the next person to decide their page was ready enough.

Several people brought their children, and every one of them got a site online. That alone would have made the event worth doing. Plenty of adults published too. The follow-up page now links to at least fifteen attendee sites, along with photos and other pieces from the day.

Ashley, a reporter from WHRO, came to take photographs and interview people. She stayed for the full session, made her own Neocities microblog, and has kept updating it since. She came to cover a room full of people making websites and ended up making one alongside them.

I keep coming back to that. We had put together something that looked a little like a class, but the room didn't feel much like one after the presentation. People wrote, wandered around, helped each other, published when they were ready, and cheered when someone else did the same.

There's room for beginner and hobby coding events

Most of the tech events I attend assume a certain amount of existing knowledge. Even when a talk is accessible, there's usually an unspoken baseline. You know the tools and vocabulary, and you have enough context to know why the specialized thing being discussed matters.

HTML Day asked people to bring a laptop, or pen and paper, and make something. That was about it.

People stayed engaged for hours, and both kids and adults published something. The event convinced me that Hampton Roads has an appetite for events aimed at beginners, early learners, and people who just want to make something for fun. The point wasn't to build the most efficient page or solve a professional problem. Writing the HTML was the activity.

People don't always need another expert talk, or another reason to make coding productive. Sometimes they need a room where it's normal to start from nothing and ask the person next to them for help.

ECPI is interested in hosting again, and people have asked about doing something similar in Williamsburg. We haven't scheduled anything yet. It could be another HTML Day or a follow-up that starts with HTML and adds CSS and design. We've talked about doing it quarterly or twice a year, but I don't want to turn that interest into an announcement before we know what we're actually doing.

In the meantime, I host Late Night Builders on the first Thursday of each month from 9:00 PM until midnight at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Virginia Beach Town Center. Chazona and I also host monthly Code & Coffees on Saturday mornings at coffee shops around Hampton Roads. The next one, as of publishing, will be at Cafe Stella in Norfolk. 757Tech.org is the best place to keep up with those and other local events.

HTML Day happened because a friend asked where she could put her poetry. She wasn't in the room that day, but her question gave the rest of us somewhere to start.

Links and credits

Hampton Roads HTML Day was hosted by Ryan McGovern, Chazona Baum, and Austin Galyon, with support from 757dev and ECPI. Val Town sponsored pastries and coffee. RevolutionVA sponsored lunch. Paul Chin Jr., Kevin Griffin, Linda Nichols, and many other members of the local community helped make the day possible.