John Polacek

Chicago Web Developer

Engineering manager and frontend lead at Howl

My product recommendations at shop.howl.me

Shipping open source on Github

Follow me at @johnpolacek

Color to Color

Color to Color

I like to wear dress shirts with matching socks. Sometimes I buy socks in a set and have no shirts that match. How can I find a shirt to match my sock, or a sock to match my shirt? I decided to build a thing. Check it out at colortocolor.com.

Design Systems Playground

Design Systems Playground

I finished a rebuild of my Design Systems Playground project. Open sourced on Github. Built with React / Gatsby. Styles and theming by Theme UI. Animations with Greensock. Deployed to Netlify. Tested with Cypress.

MDX Deck with Greensock Animation

I combined my favorite new React presentation deck awesome sauce (MDX Deck) with my favorite old do-anything-you-can-imagine animation platform (Greensock) to make an animated version of the MDX Deck Demo. Check it out at mdx-deck-greensock-demo.netlify.com and on Github.

ChicagoTechEvents.com Redesign

Chicago Tech Events Website

The chicagotechevents.com website is getting a new design and being rebuilt as a Gatsby site and hosted on Netlify. People will be able to submit events via a Netlify Function that creates a new markdown file for the new event and uses the Github API to create a pull request which I can then review and add to the site.

Making a Gatsby Events List Starter

I made a basic events list Gatsby Starter, forked from the Gatsby blog starter. See it in action at gatsby-starter-events-list.netlify.com/ and check out the code on Github.

Hello World Again

As one does, I have re-done my Wordpress blog with Gatsby. Why? No more database. Better performance. Great developer/authoring experience. Authoring in MD.. MDX... yeah, that’s the good stuff.