Throughout the past year, I have been keeping a running list of cool local Chicago tech events and sharing it with friends and the people at work. I’ve decided to make it into a thing and put it out there. So I present to you… chicagotechevents.com

I managed to have some fun building it too. It was my first time using Twig templates, and really liked it. I expect I’m going to be using that on a lot of things in the future. Also, I am trying out a couple AWS products. I built the backend on DynamoDB because why not. I made a simple admin page for adding the events to DynamoDB. Every day, a CRON job runs that goes through the events and makes a JSON file with all the data, and puts it onto S3. When you go to chicagotechevents.com, it is loading that JSON file and smushing it together with a Twig template. Nice and simple.

I am also using Amazon SES for the first time for sending out the email newsletter, because the price was right and integration was easy (so far).