Tools for the Modern Web Developer

Developers today have the blessing and the curse of a plethora of tools. On the one hand, we have pretty much all of our bases covered - often for free. On the other, it can be tough to keep pace with all the tools and what they are good for.

In this month’s meetup, we’ll explore a couple of these tools and get to know them. First, Chris Coyier will go through CodePen and how to take advantage of this social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Then Shannon Soper will explore GatsbyJS, a blazing-fast static site generator for React.

An Introduction to Using CodePen

CodePen is an online code editor for front end code. Let’s dig into how you use and get into some trickery you might not know about even if you’re a seasoned CodePen user.

What makes Gatsby sites so fast?

Learn what makes GatsbyJS sites so fast and hear from other developers why they like building with Gatsby. Then, watch how you can start building a highly performant site in just a few minutes. Finally, learn how to contribute to Gatsby as an open source project and get a sneak peak at upcoming feature releases.

Chris is a web designer and developer that tries to help other people get better at those things. He’s also the co-founder of CodePen, a social development environment for web designers and developers.

Chris has co-hosted a podcast called ShopTalk, a show about building websites, for over 10 years and 500 episodes. He also built CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, and ran it for 15 years, from 2007 to 2022, before selling it to DigitalOcean.

Shannon works doing UX research at GatsbyJS. She is a Utah native who enjoys teaching and performing music and keeping up with her dog’s Instagram fans. She teaches college-level writing on the side.

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