The year may be rolling past, but we're not slowing down - there is so much more JavaScript to get to! This month, we're lucky to have Geoff talking to us about building static sites with Gatsby, and PJ giving us the low-down on serverless functions. Join us for some drinks, pizza and JavaScript!
Agenda:
Static sites with Gatsby Geoffrey Hunt (@geoff4l)
A static site comprises of some html, css and js files hosted on a server, simple and how we used to do things. Some advantages of a static site are cost, scale and speed which is why many people are using this approach for blogs and documentation sites today. Jekyll was one of the first proper static site generators to launch, it helped you write content in markdown files and then generated the html and css based on a theme. There have been a number of static site generators pop up over the years with this basic concept.
I have used static site generators to build my blog and I will chat about my experience with some of the frameworks I’ve tried. Then I will show you an approach that new js frameworks are using to help you build static sites. Using react and some plugins they use server side rendering to generate the static html, css and js. This gives you the advantages of a static site without losing the power of react. I will specifically focus on Gatsby (https://www.gatsbyjs.org) because I really like it.
What are Serverless functions anyway? PJ Welcome (@pjapplez)
This talk will be about serverless functions: what they are, how we use them and what cloud providers offer us in this realm. We will look into examples of how serverless functions can be used as a new way of writing API endpoints.