October 28th Meeting Summary

This past Saturday a small group of ladyDevs met at St. Kilda. We enjoyed smoothies, hot chocolate, soup, and sandwiches while discussing the direction of the group.

Several who attended expressed their desire to reach out and collaborate with groups in the area. We paid particular attention to hosting a discussion panel or table talk with Web Geeks. Art Directors was also mentioned.

We also discussed ideas for future events:
One idea posed was to host an “Intro to Code” event aimed at women in the community to help lower the barrier to entry. Coding intimidates a lot of people. So, we’d like to foster an environment where women feel comfortable and encouraged to learn about it.

Hack Nights also received a mention at the event. We would like to set aside time, on a regular basis, to get together and work on side projects.
As a reminder, the Saturday morning study group is a good place to hack somethings together, as well.

Speaking of group projects, Jesse mentioned that she secured the domain ladydev.org. She has also created a new slack channel devoted to this. So, reach out to her for information if you haven’t already joined.

There has also been a new slack channel devoted to this newsletter. Feel free to reach out to Danielle if you’d like to help out or just want access to the slack channel.

We look forward to picking up where we left off on Donate DSM, as well, now that PLIBMTLBHGATY (October 7th) has passed with marked success.

Code Reviews

During the October meeting we also got to see a couple of cool project work from a few members.

Renee

Renee designed and developed a custom WordPress layout for a client. The client scheduled the site for release on Halloween. Renee, herself coded every out over the course of three two-week sprints. She build the site using the Bedrock boilerplate from Roots. She built her design using the Roots Sage theme, and worked primarily with Sass.

She encountered some issues while building this. One challenge involved wrestling with Bootstrap and hacking it to create nested menus.

Another issue came from the behavior of some major components animated by Swiper. A structural component between foreground and background content would not stay still. She eventually found a way to get only the background image and the foreground content to rotate. Her solution involved creating two layered content boxes to rotate these objects, individually.

Jesse

Jesse is working with a team to build a component UI library. She showcased a specific model on which she was working. This module seeks out invalid avatars. It then constructs a fallback from that user’s initials and a random background color.

She also talked about Styleguidist and how it helped their team by streamlining documentation for the project.

Tori

Tori showcased her most recent project for her Flatiron School Bootcamp. The project specified that she should create a small site with a login system that allowed users to make and tag posts. Since she has an interest in crafts, she created a crafts showcase site, similar to Deviant Art. She created a system of associations, which would allow someone to tag their posts. Using these associations, she made it possible for users to find projects by tag.

During her work on the project, she learned about a tool called Devise, though she was not allowed to incorporate it. She was, however, able to incorporate Omniauth for Facebook authentications. She said she really enjoyed building the validations.