Talks
Short List
Details
Cypress is “fast, easy and reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser”. It is batteries-included so it comes fully loaded with useful features and perks. It is also open-source, has a strong user community, and is backed by great documentation.
While easy to get started, this dojo will help those looking to jumpstart their experience with Cypress. This includes those new to end-to-end testing and automation engineers coming from a Selenium-based testing background. Prerequisites will be NodeJS locally installed and the project repo downloaded and installed.
To get started testing quickly, I provide a React project with Cypress tests already written for it. We will spend some time getting acquainted with the project layout. Then we will begin exploring running tests in Cypress. We will soon discover that some tests are broken. Fixing these tests will be our first testing task. Then we will create more tests based on the suggestions provided in code. Students are then encouraged to explore more ways to test the application.
Remember the days when we could throw HTML on a server and call it good? Back when markup mattered and JavaScript was a progressive feature – everything we needed came from the server. Where did those static sites go? They’ve all but fallen out of favor compared to our modern instant feedback web apps served from the browser. Until now.
Like fashion, programing trends must be cyclical because static sites are back. It started with Jekyll, generating simple static HTML out of raw Markdown. Then became wildly popular with site generators like Gatsby. Now universal isomorphic apps are commonplace in modern programming. Hitting that sweet spot between the server-rendered static sites of yesterday and the cool new instant feedback of a modern web app.
What kind of apps are you building today? How would you like your apps rendered? Join DSM Web Geeks and DSM JS on a group video chat, June 8th. We’ll discuss implementation pitfalls, maintenance woes, or general optimism toward the state of dynamic and server-rendered web apps.
We can agree that testing is important for software development, but how and what we test is not so straight forward or agreed upon. Extending beyond unit, integration, and acceptance or end-to-end testing, our solutions need to also consider security, performance, load, usability, and exploratory testing. When there’s always another bug lurking on the periphery, it’s perhaps most important that a team considers the levels of testing their solution demands and agrees upon a testing plan that outlines responsibilities and expectations. From non-functional requirements to data management, from third party integration to environments, we’ll discuss levels of consideration for maximum extermination.
Michael and his team bravely broke from the tradition of Protractor for Angular end-to-end testing and forged a new path in their local community by using Cypress. Was the grass greener? Yes, it was. This talk will cover at a high level what Cypress is, what it offers and who is likely to use it. Then we’ll dive into built-in features that make Cypress so awesome to use. Michael will also discuss common challenges faced when creating and implementing an end-to-end test suite. This includes test structuring, dealing with authentication, timing issues and more.
Publishing blazing fast and secure websites has never been easier or so inexpensive (a.k.a. free). Let’s set WordPress aside and dive into the world of Headless CMS and statically built sites! This workshop should be accessible to all, but experience with npm, CMS structures, React, Gatsby, Netlify deployment will help! In this dojo you will get a brief introduction on these new technologies and what do they do. Then you will dive into a hands activity, seeing how far you can get into:
- Creating a new Gatsby project
- Setting up Contentful to create headless CMS data models and content
- Linking Contentful to Gatsby to fetch your Contentful data and display it on your website
- Using Gatsby’s GraphQL playground to test queries
- Deploying your Gatsby site to Netlify
- Connecting Contentful to Netlify to trigger builds when your data changes
It may be a tall order, but definitely possible, to achieve all this in an hour. Whatever you don’t finish in the dojo will be available in tutorial format to finish at home. Bring your computer, bring a friend and let’s build some websites!
JAMStack, say what? Publishing blazing fast and secure websites has never been easier or so free. This talk should be accessible to all, but experience in CMS structure, React, Gatsby, Netlify (or similar) deployment will help! In this talk you can expect to learn about these new technologies and what do they do. How to start a new Gatsby site (or how to start the one I built). How to setup Contentful and create your first model and content. How to link Contentful and Gatsby, use GraphQL to fetch this data and display it on your website. How to use Gatsby’s GraphQL playground to test queries. Finally you’ll see how to deploy to Netlify and connect Contentful to Netlify to trigger builds when your data changes.
Join us Monday September 9th for a Web Geeks Dojo on Django. This is a perfect opportunity to learn a new framework for web development. You’ll want to bring a laptop or a friend with a laptop. If you don’t have either don’t fret — our community is welcoming to all and always willing to help.
In this workshop, we will build API endpoints and template pages for user consumption using Django. At the end of our group work, we will have two REST URL endpoints built for client-side consumption and several HTML templates to present a human-readable format. This demonstrates the potential for Django to be used as both as a headless CMS and or a traditional fullstack CMS.
Django, a high-level Python web framework, with the powerful toolkit Django Rest Framework (DRF), allows for the quick and simple API development that we will be doing. We’ll start by building our models, views, and serializers. We will investigate these objects in the python shell and check out the Django Admin, which offers great potential as a CMS. We will also plug in our models through views to HTML templates. After working as a group on our first model/URL endpoint, attendees can troubleshoot issues, take a stab at building their own project, or continue with the tutorial two directions: building an additional model/URL endpoint or investigate deploying our project onto Heroku.
As Sir Mix-a-lot once said, “My API don’t want none unless you off prem, hun.” Let’s take cloud deployed code one step further and ask: Do we need to spin up a full server to create a REST API? This talk will be an interactive discussion on the joys of deploying backend code and the new alternatives. We will start by looking at Heroku as an alternative to AWS and DigitalOcean for deploying a Django project. Then we’ll dive into using backends as a service (BaaS) like Firebase and wrap up with a demo of headless CMS platforms like Contenful. Demos of frontend clients will be in Angular, but similar practices extend to React, Vue and other JS Frameworks.
In 2019, most developers find themselves building applications using frontend JavaScript frameworks that query data from an API. One of those frontend frameworks is Ember.js, which comes batteries-included with routing, models, testing and an ecosystem of plugins and helpers. Django, a high-level MVC Python web framework, with the powerful toolkit Django Rest Framework (DRF), is a useful tool for powering API development.
Michael Johnson will speak about Full Stack Web Development with Ember.js and Django in Python. This talk will cover high-level concepts about APIs, as well as low-level demonstration of code required to connect frontend to the backend. The final product will make client-side (browser) changes that will persist in a database through the API.
Join us for this lunch talk on Wednesday, May 8th at 12pm noon. We Write Code is hosting and providing lunch, so please RSVP so we have an accurate count.
This is a hands on workshop on developing your WordPress site and migrating it to a live environment. Our objectives for this session are to:
- Learn how develop locally on your computer with Local by Flywheel
- Understand and inspect the difference between WP files and your database
- Migrate your website to live (if you have hosting purchased, otherwise you will migrate to another local site) with All-in-One WP Migration
- Bonus: Manually install WP and hook up a new database
Resources: Installing Local by Flywheel Need further help? Complete Step 1 Here
Full tutorial for this workshop
Before, during and after the workshop is time to catch up, discuss what we're being challenged with, and what we'd like for future WP DSM Meetups. All levels of experiences are encouraged to join!
