Meeting Notes
Homebrew Website Club Baltimore had our second June meetup at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on Wednesday, June 27th.
Here are the notes from the broadcast portion of tonight’s gathering!
Rhea
rhearamakrishnan.com – Over the last month, Rhea organized a writing workshop and used her website to promote it. There was a lot of interest and Rhea’s workshop is running every Tuesday from 8-10pm on Skype! Each workshop has 12 short fiction or poetry writers who bring their writing for a peer critique. Every week, 3 writers in attendance share what they’ve done, and then the group spends 30-40 minutes providing their feedback.
Rhea knows several of the workshop participants from college but has some new faces join that she didn’t know! Rhea facilitated the first session but then the group has been trading off the facilitator role. She’s done 3 workshops so far! Jonathan encouraged Rhea to mention HWC to her fellow writers.
Adam
wavesmesh.net – Adam got his site up and running for his Waves Mesh project. Since the last HWC meetup, Adam got a server, domain, and WordPress site set up. He’s been working on his landing page and has added content to the site. He’s considering switching names for his project and is thinking through some ideas. His next steps for the site:
- Setting up LetsEncrypt on WordPress (or directly on his AWS instance)
- Troubleshoot and configure the Learn More form
- Working on formatting copy and layout
- Is working on an interactive heat map for Internet connectivity in Baltimore — a goal is to add this to the site
Jonathan
jonathanprozzi.net – Has been busy working on various web projects. Put up a site recently for a local non-profit. He’s been spending a lot of time practicing his layout skills. Jonathan wrote a post about Gatsby last week and is restructuring his site to likely shift to Gatsby. He determined that he wanted to level up his modern CSS skills and started making a layout nearly every day. since June 23. He’s taken lots of screenshots and is writing a post about this process. It’s been very productive and a great, fun way to build CSS Grid and Flexbox skills.
Attending From Afar
martymcgui.re – Attending IndieWebSummit 2018 in Portland! We’re looking forward to hearing all the great things that Marty has to share!
Other Discussion Topics
We talked about some potential workshop ideas to help attendees get up and running with websites. Thinking through some of these steps — perhaps we could have set days with certain structured projects.
We also discussed web security and performance/optimization and whether or not it’s the developer’s responsibility to provide the best possible experience for the user. This includes ensuring that you’re serving a performant, secure website. WordPress came up in this conversation — basically how there are tradeoffs that must always be acknowledged and accounted for.
Adam and Darius shared insights from his recent trip to New York with Darius where they worked with NYC Mesh on an installation. We talked about some strategy ideas for Adam’s project and some potential next steps.
As always, great meetup with great discussion!