This is a personal project of mine that grew out of some of my initial work with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Development Kit (CDK). As the CDK allows the user to choose their language of choice to develop in, I chose to go with JavaScript. About this time, myself and three of my Masonic Brothers decided to start a Masonic conference that catered to esoteric topics.
Recognizing a need that having a website would be one part in our advertising and marketing campaign for us, I stepped up to develop the site. Our requirements were quite simple, much like the site I developed, it had to be cost-effective, tell the World who we are, provide them information about our conference, and advertise our speaker list. I quickly settled on Gatsby, as it would allow me to quickly stand-up a site, and host in using a combination of S3, CloudFront and Route 53 in my AWS account.
Mid-Atlantic Esotericon Homepage
The site is built using the Grayscale starter template built and maintained by Anubhav Srivastava, and tweeked to fit our needs as an organization. Noteable additions have included Zapier integration so users can sign up for our mailing lists, and Google Analytics integration as well. As a relatively straight forward starter template, its served as a great learning opportunity in learning about JavaScript, Gatsby and React. The documentation is robust, and the developer community active making it gernally easy to find answers to questions.
Not one to rest on my laurels, I am continually looking to how I can keep improving the site. Over the coming year I will be looking to add native Mailchimp functionality, so our users can sign up for updates directly through Mailchimp, and avoid a middle man as well as PayPal functionality so attendees can purchase tickets from the site directly, and not through Eventbrite as we are currently set up to do. Further out I'd like to add some simple tests to the site as well. Who knows where things will go from there.