Saturday, September 29, 2018

I saw Luke Schlangen speak at JavaScript MN on Wednesday night on deployments.

Some interesting things were name dropped. GatsbyJS is a React-based tool that allows one to build static web sites quickly. Hugo and Jekyll are other, rival static site generators. Netlify at https://app.netlify.com/ is an intriguing environment where you may quickly host such a site. You may just drag and drop files into the web interface to get them online. You can name a project and Netlify will make a ceremonial little convenience URL for your web site. What is more, if you point the A record for a domain name to Netlify you can, yes, have your domain name resolve to the off-the-cuff hosting and have a real web site by anyone's definition. Maybe this is the new GeoCities, eh? If you don't create an account at Netlify your creations will only last a day, but if you create an account your hosting will be ongoing. Luke opined about how he had packed a bunch of stuff onto Netlify's platform and that they were nonetheless yet to reach out to him for a credit card number or to suggest any sort of payment plan. Another chunk of this talk went into Firebase. "What is the cloud? It's someone else's computer." (Luke verbatim.) We goofed off with Heroku some too. You can't push a Node server up to Firebase or Netlify but in both cases the workaround is to use Google Cloud Functions. These are going to be just what they sound like, some sort of function "out there" that you call out to and get something back from. I don't know how canned versus customizable they are. GitHub Pages is another service for hosting simple static stuff. Luke said that he shied away from using it in his live coding demo as it can take five minutes for your deployments to appear online. Google's Lighthouse will audit your web site and give you performance metrics on how heavy or snappy it is. Matt boasted of how he could get a metric of 90 for one of the simple sites he spun up while google.com itself had a mere 89. Scratch is a very visual scripting language for kids and there is a Scratch IDE. The Scratch IDE, which is web-based, was run through Lighthouse to show off of an example of a performance monster that is going to be judged very harshly by Lighthouse. What else is there to say? Before Luke Schlangen (rightmost in the photo, being introduced by Brandon Johnson) spoke a Terrance Schubring gave a lightning talk on a React component that he had baked. The venue for JavaScript MN has moved to a locale called space150 and this was the first go in the space150 office. The turnout seemed pretty robust in spite of the shakeup.

No comments:

Post a Comment