John Polacek

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.

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

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.

I built this new school/old school CSS/JS thing. It is awesome and it sucks. Maybe you can learn something from it? That would be great. That’s why I did it. You can do something better probably. Please do.

I attended the AWS Summit in Chicago this week. Like many other tech companies, we at Gesture use various AWS products so it was a nice opportunity to get exposed to what is becoming possible with their platform.

Over the weekend, I gave a talk titled Rethinking CSS - Go Functional for Scaling, Performance & Simplicity at Front End Camp Chicago. The event was organized by the folks at Chicago Camps who do a fantastic job of putting on conferences for a great price.