The first Gatsby day 2020 was held at Convene in downtown Los Angeles, CA . This was our first time attending as members of weKnow Inc and it surely won’t be our last. We were was very interested in attending this Gatsby event because this tool is fairly new but is gaining a lot of traction really quickly, we have worked in some projects and can’t wait to work with Gatsby even more because it’s very powerful: you can build fast websites which is important for search engines and to have the user happy while using them, and the best thing is that its fun to work with, it has a great developer experience and also with the help of typescript, maintaining a Gatsby site doesn’t become a painful task.
This event was something special for many reasons but one in particular : weKnow is looking forward to organize a gatsby day in Latin America, as we are a remote company, we have JavaScript, React and Gatsby developers on all Latin America and we will be happy to support this open source project and future events in places such as Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador or Colombia. We at weKnow Inc collaborate on several open source projects already, Drupal, WordPress, etc and support several communities across the globe.
Sunday Pre-Conference Workshop
Intro to Building Accessible Sites with Gatsby dictated by Marcy Sutton @marcysutton. As an accessibility advocates, we were glad to learn more on the subject. Marcy is a great educator and she was always willing to elaborate more when someone had a question. We were very impressed on how she managed to explain really well all the material she had. The main focus was how to build fast, accessible sites with Gatsby from server-side rendering and progressive enhancement to integration and unit testing of components and pages. If you want to it check out the material go here:
This workshop explored on how to incorporate accessibility into your web development workflow. How to debug your sites and applications using the latest tools on accessibility. How to apply accessibility to React web applications with Gatsby, while learning how accessibility applies to other stacks. The benefits of manual and automated testing, semantic markup, unobtrusive animation, progressive enhancement and much more. We were also gladly impressed by how the community is really committed to make websites accessible to everyone, they really think on every way possible to improve the user experience for everyone with or without a disability, that showed us why gatsby is growing as a technology and as a community this fast.
We personally enjoyed discovering new tools like Accessibility Insights for Web (https://accessibilityinsights.io/), or learn about functional components, client-side routing and the automation testing with Selenium and Cypress on Gatsby.js.
The Monday Gatsby Day LA 2020 event
We woke up very early on Monday to attend the main event. We enjoyed a wonderful breakfast at the venue. The main room was packed and people were sharing about Gatsby, Js and other cool features.
We made new friends and met old ones like Zac Gordon (event speaker). Zac had created a number of resources — Courses, Conferences, Bootcamps, Tutorials all of them to help folks in the Open Source Community to learn JavaScript! He have been in Costa Rica a couple of times and we have shared in the past in other open source events.
The first talk of the day was the Keynote of the event by the Gatsby creator Kyle Mathews. We talked about a gatsby day 2020 in Costa Rica just before his talk and he was very pleased about the idea.
Then we had many great speakers as Dustin Schau, Joshua Coumeau, Kyle Boss, Daniel Kim, Gatare Libère, Yuraima Estevez, Kathleen McMahon, Paul Veen, Grant Glidewell and Zac Gordon with one of my favorite talk of the day. He gave examples of how to use dynamic elements on Gatsby.js, he presented in just 15 min examples and plugins to work with Comments, Forms, Memberships, Ecommerce, LMS and Dynamic Gutenberg Blocks.
You can find the slides of this talk over here: https://wp.zacgordon.com/2020/02/03/highly-dynamic-wordpress-sites-at-gatsby-days-la-2020/
While we were listening to Kyle Mathews and the people who works in gatsby, we realized that they are working really hard to improve gatsby even more than they achieved already, gatsby is fast but they aren’t just sitting there, they are working on the developer experience, plugins, the speed of the page load, the speed of code compiling which already is quicker compared to many other technologies and they just launched gatsby themes a few months ago which is making development easier.
Many outstanding companies are trusting in gatsby to create their static content pages and websites such as tinder, MDX and even e-commerce parties are integrating gatsby into their environments; that tells us how trustworthy gatsby is being so young, and it was awesome to see that many of them are supporting gatsby creating more and more plugins to integrate other technologies such as, shopify, drupal and wordpress.
We also had 2 unconference sessions. In these sessions we participated in the gatsby accessibility and how to do beautiful themes on gatsby. In both sessions we shared knowledge with other attendees and we talked about our experience building websites with gatsby using theme-UI, tailwind css, and accessibility tools as ANDY.
The day ended with a happy hour. Drinks, food and open source community, what a wonderful combination! . we had the chance to chat more in depth with Kyle, Hasim, Jason and other community fellows about the future of Gatsby on Latin America and how to involve more people in the region.
Conclusion
For me this was an amazing experience and i can’t wait to attend the next one and share our experience building awesome Drupal-Gatsby apps. We were excited for the opportunity to learn and meet new open source advocates.
In case you missed the event you can get the Live stream of Gatsby Days on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxxYParyAGk&feature=youtu.be****