Meeting Notes
Homebrew Website Club Baltimore had our first August meetup at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on Wednesday, August 8th.
Here are the notes from the broadcast portion of tonight’s gathering!
Derek
- Site: derekfields.is
- Share:
- Derek has been working through a Vue course and has been working with templates. After practicing working with how Vue handles styles and templates, he’ll be jumping into using conditionals with v-if. The first main project he’ll be working on is a calculator.
- Derek also started using the latest vue-cli which has a great GUI for creating and managing Vue projects.
- Thumbs up for Vue!
- Goals:
- Get the Vue projects done!
- Derek wants to get back consistent documentation and updates via a blog.
Darius
- Site: dariusmccoy.com
- Share:
- Darius was going to work on his personal site but ended up using the quiet writing time to work on a client website.
- Darius fixed Route53 by scrapping the previous one and made a new one. This solved the issues he was having with his site.
- Once he has more free time he’s going to be working on his personal site again.
- He’s been evaluating the pros/cons between AWS and DigitalOcean for hosting his WordPress site.
- Through working with clients, Darius has been building his CSS skills and gaining respect for the tools.
- In addition to CSS, Darius has been using Photoshop to create visuals for clients.
- Goals:
- To be more productive in his personal time!
- He wants to be more productive during the quiet writing time during the HWC meetups.
Jonathan
- Site: jonathanprozzi.net
- Share:
- Things have been on hold for deep dive personal projects lately. I’ve been working a lot with Figma and love it. My main motivation is on building lots of designs and components. I’ve created various prototypes with Figma for both work and personal projects.
- I really enjoy creating layouts and prototypes with Figma and then recreating each one with HTML and CSS. I still enjoy working with React and have two upcoming projects using React, but have been fighting some fatigue lately and am having a lot of fun creating designs that address specific issues.
- This is a trend I’ve noticed with myself. I tend to fall back and strengthen my core skills when I’m less motivated to learn new things. I know I’ll be back into React soon because of projects that necessitate it, but I’ve been having a hard time working on skill-building side projects that aren’t strictly design or HTML/CSS.
- Goals:
- My main goal is to continue to refine my Figma to web workflow. I’ve gotten really fast at prototyping due to Figma’s component system.
- I want to get back on track as far as creating content and other IndieWeb goals, but realistically I won’t be able to until mid-September or later.
- With that said, I’d like to start trying to write at least one new post a week.
From left to right: jonathanprozzi.net, dariusmccoy.com, derekfields.is
Other Discussion Topics
We briefly talked about the benefits of using prototyping tools such as Adobe XD and Figma. Jonathan loves using Figma and has used XD in the past. There is a lot of benefit to using these tools for creating prototypes and building design skills, but they’re a bit less helpful for working within an existing theme.
Freelancing! Creating static sites for people and looking into WordPress alternatives. We talked about how #JAMStack is potentially becoming a great approach for client work. Some API based CMSes such as Contentful and CosmicJS are filling this niche.
We also other more full CMSes, such as CraftCMS. Another discussion topic was how to handle hosting WordPress for clients, especially since it requires a server or hosting package. This led to a discussion of the pros/cons of static sites and WordPress sites for working with clients. We then talked about headless CMSes and headless WordPress as a potential solution. The drawback is that this is still a complex solution.