HWC NYC Wrap-Up 2019-04-03

New York City's first Homebrew Website Club of April met at The Bean at Cooper Union on April 3rd, with me playing host.

Here are some notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup!

zazzyzeph.biz (new!) — Learning about Progressive Web Apps and their features, like web app manifests. Started out wanting to learn ES6 and decided to roll back to some basics. Doesn't have a specific project in mind, yet, so doing lots of reading.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Continuing work on "v2" of his website, specifically notifications API. "v2" is more package-based than repository-based, as a single repo can hold multiple packages, and it's very helpful to reason about the projects individually. Demonstrated showing unread notifications from Gerrit and GitHub, new presentation to show

martymcgui.re — Re-organized his homepage to be much simpler, moving incrementally towards having easier ways for people to discover the newer parts of his site, like where he displays photos, listens, and more interesting ways than his main "river of posts" timeline view. Also added book cover photos to his reading posts (example) using the Open Library Covers API with lookup by ISBN.

Other discussion:

• Building your own organizational and self-management tools. Balancing time spent on that tooling versus actually getting things done.
• Updating, migrating, and archiving old behaviors and versions in APIs. "Gradual code repair". Making "v2" versions of pieces of an API while allowing "v1" apps to work, hybrid apps to work. Semantic versioning when "v2" could change wildly - is it "really v2-pre-0.0.1", for example? A name like that should warn away folks starting new projects that expect a stable API.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, April 17th at 6:30pm!