Every conference hands you a printed schedule when you walk in. You glance at it once, fold it into your pocket, and by 11am it’s irrelevant. The chair ran ten minutes long. The panel before lunch got cancelled. The session you actually wanted to see has moved to a different time slot and nobody told the people standing in the hallway looking at a piece of paper from yesterday.
I went to the MMC Ireland conference and watched this happen in real time. Nobody had a laptop open. Everyone had a phone. The printed programme was decoration.
So I built the thing that should have been there.
It’s a live schedule. Not a static page with times on it, but a page that knows what time it is and reacts to it. Open it during the conference and the session currently happening is highlighted. The countdown above it tells you how long is left. If the chair runs over, the schedule knows. If the next session starts late, you don’t have to ask anyone — you just look at your phone.
The whole thing is mobile-only on purpose. I talked about the last MMC conference with colleagues and by looking around the room, they didn’t see a single laptop. Everyone checks the schedule between sessions, standing with a coffee, one-handed.
What’s actually on the page
A few things are doing work at once:
The header has a countdown to the conference starting, and once it’s running, it flips to showing what’s live right now and what’s coming up next. The “are we ahead or behind schedule” signal is the quiet hero. It’s not a banner that yells at you. It just means the live indicator is honest about reality instead of pretending the printed times are still true.
Below that is the full programme, top to bottom. Each item has its type (Keynote, Panel, Break, Networking), its start time, its duration, and where there are speakers, their faces. Tap a session and you get the room, the abstract, and the speakers. Tap a speaker and you get their bio, their company, and if you want to connect on LinkedIn, the link is right there. No business card hunting. No squinting at a name badge from across a room.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A conference is mostly an excuse for the conversations between sessions. Making the speakers one tap away from a real connection is the part of the schedule that does the work nobody asks for but everyone needs.
The programme is a list of slots, not a list of talks
The full programme on the home screen is intentionally flat. Top to bottom, in order, one card per slot. The chair opening, the keynote, the coffee break, the session on workforce transformation, the lunch, the panel, the drinks reception. They’re all the same shape on the list because from the attendee’s point of view they all answer the same question: what’s happening at 11:15.
What they’re not is all the same underneath.
Two kinds of slots
A slot is either simple or a session.
A simple slot is one thing. Coffee break. Chair opening. Lunch. The keynote is also a simple slot. One block of time, one description, maybe a speaker attached to it. Tap it and you see what it is, when it ends, who’s running it. That’s the whole story.
A session is a container. It’s a topic — Workforce Transformation, Product and System Standardisation in Construction, Industrialised Construction & Innovation — that runs for an hour or two and has multiple talks inside it, sometimes with different speakers, sometimes with a Q&A panel at the end. On the main programme it’s still a single card. You don’t see the internals until you tap in.
This was a deliberate choice. If I’d exploded every session into its individual talks on the home screen, the list would be forty items long and the rhythm of the day would be lost. You’d be scrolling past five sub-talks just to find the lunch break. The home screen is for navigating the day. The session screen is for navigating the session.
What a session detail page does
Tap into Workforce Transformation during the conference and you get the second screenshot. A few things going on at once: The header tells you it’s live. The “Live” pill in the top right is the same colour the slot card was on the main list. Continuity, not decoration. Below the title, two cards side by side. TIME on the left is the slot’s own clock — when it started, how long it runs. REMAINING on the right is the live one — 23 minutes left, ends at 12:25, and a progress bar that fills as the session burns down. If the conference is running behind, this is where you find out. No banner, no notification. Just an honest progress bar.
Sponsor credit gets its own row underneath. It’s there, but it’s not competing with the content.
Then the talks. The list is labelled with the count — Talks (5) — and a quiet 2 past link in the corner that lets you scroll back if you missed something. The currently-live talk is in green and lifted out of the stack visually. The number badge on the right says it’s the second talk of the session. Above it, 11:55 · 20m. Below it, the speakers attached to that talk, each one as their own row with their photo, name, and company.
The speaker rows have a chevron. Tap one and you get the bio. That’s part three.
Documentation of this project is still in progress