The student club at the University of St. Thomas that builds things with AI.
ustnexus.club · Build workshop · Buildfest · The board
NEXUS is a student-run organisation in St. Paul, Minnesota. We run workshops, build projects, and host Buildfest, the campus hackathon. Everything in this organisation was written by students, it is all deployed and running right now, and most of it is meant to be copied — the workshop repository in particular exists so that any club, anywhere, can re-run the same session without asking us first.
- Workshops. Short, practical sessions with no prerequisites. The flagship is Build Your Personal Website: from nothing to a live site in about twenty minutes, first run 4 December 2025.
- Buildfest. A campus hackathon on the theme AI for the Common Good, open to students of any major and any experience level, judged by working practitioners. The 2026 winners — Sofa, CarryOn and RoutesForGood — are credited on the event site.
- Projects. Members take an idea to something other people can actually open in a browser.
- The club itself. Eight board members run recruitment, events, sponsorship and the website, and every one of them is named and linked on the board page.
| Repository | What it is |
|---|---|
| ClubPage | The club site — ustnexus.club. Homepage, board page, the Buildfest microsite and a branded 404. Static HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript on GitHub Pages. |
| build-workshop | Build Your Personal Website, start to finish, at build.ustnexus.club. The slides, the live demo script, the presenter notes and the follow-up reference — one page, no build step. |
| nexus-forum | An earlier attempt at a community forum. Archived, and not deployed. |
Two more repositories — an internal members site and the original Buildfest event build — are private, because they carry member and registration data. They are not linked here on purpose.
Every site in this organisation is hand-written HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript served by GitHub
Pages on a custom domain. No framework, no bundler, no build step, no CI. That is a deliberate choice
for a club whose maintainers change every year: a new member with a text editor can fix a typo and
watch it go live two minutes later, and nothing rots between semesters because there is nothing to
upgrade. The whole stack is a repository, a CNAME file and a push to main.
The house style is shared across the sites: a dark theme, University of St. Thomas purple, Inter for
text and JetBrains Mono for code. Read style.css
if you want to lift it.
Students: come to an event, then join. Start at ustnexus.club and use the contact details there. You do not need to know how to code — the workshops assume you do not.
Mentors, judges and sponsors: Buildfest is the one to look at. It runs on the common-good theme, and the schedule, judging format and FAQ are all on the public page so you can decide in five minutes whether it is worth your Saturday.
Other student organisations: take the workshop. It is a complete session — outline, slides, demo path and handout — and re-running it costs you one afternoon of preparation instead of six.
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