Wednesday's JavaScript MN meetup was spearheaded by Jenessa White presenting on Gatsby.

Gatsby is a static site generator built on top of React. It uses GraphQL as its query language and Redux under the hood. Jenessa walked us through creating a blog with it. It requires Node and you have to use either yarn or npm also. Apparently the documentation is pretty good. Gatsby comes with a Prettier file .prettierrc for formatting code. gatsby-config.js allows you to define plugins and options that you'll have on your site. You may make a new page by making a new folder inside the "pages" folder and then putting an index.md file inside of the folder. .md is for markdown and the markup is all markdown (easy to read markup) which gets reshaped to HTML later via the Transformer plugin. The menu items array back in gatsby-config.js will hold the routes to the various pages. Jenessa White also mentioned that WordPress has a ReST API baked into it. I think she was also using Google Slides for her slideshow. There were a few lightning talks before the main presentation. Jason Hsu spoke on automating Docker deployments. He uses GitLab's tools to do so and I suppose GitLab is going to be something akin to Azure DevOps. Jason said Debian stretch is the latest stable version of Debian, but Debian buster will take its place in the next few months. Kevin Florenzano posed the question "What can I build in one hour?" and offered a web site hosted at DigitalOcean, some cheapo hosting, which had a bunch of Amazon affiliate (a.k.a. "Amazon Associates") links in a one page website hosted atop NGiNX. Mastodon is a social media platform where you may have your own server and the servers for the whole platform are sort of crowdsourced. Kevin has a blog at Mastodon. tinyfed.com allows you to follow others on Mastodon as a part of its magic and serverless.mn is a meetup group for serverless technologies coming in May. Erik Ostrom gave us a generic ramp up on Vue and I was surprised to learn that a Vue file will have the JavaScript, the template, and the CSS split across three files in Angular all in one file. Erik advertised that a new meetup, the Mpls Vue.js Meetup which is dedicated to Vue, was starting the very next night. I didn't think about it at the time, but this thing opened up against Avengers: Endgame. I wonder how it fared. I try to walk two miles every day (though the discipline has decayed) and while walking two miles inside of the Mall of America Thursday night I was floored by how unfull the mall was compared to any other Thursday. I guess everyone had somewhere else to be that night. It was like someone had snapped their fingers and half the people had disappeared. For that matter, I don't know why Joe Biden picked that day to announce that he was running for president. It seems foolish. I digress.