Code Collective September 1st 2018
Code Collective meetups are held at NoD Coworking on Saturdays. Here’s the recap of links and discussion topics from the meetup on Sept 1st, 2018:
Co-Hosts: Chirag, Brandon
Attendees: Fabian, Sergey, Tania, Anita, Steven, Toni-Anne
Languages/Frameworks Discussed
Ruby on Rails
.NET / C#
HTML/CSS JavaScript / jQuery
ReactJS
AngularJS
Ruby
UX / Design
MERN Stack
React Native
Links/Resources
Open Discussion
Freelancing — how do you find clients for yourself?
- Start your own business?
- Freelancers Bible —
- Doing free work…and then build up towards charging people. Word of mouth spreads. Put yourself out there. Craigslist. Twitter. Facebook. Reddit. NextDoor.com. Search on UpWork. Making a personal text or e-mail can be a better approach than using a large marketplace like UpWork.
- Competing with resources/teams in other countries that are doing the same work for cheaper.
- Go to local businesses in your neighborhood. People that you know. Small business owners. Look within your own network. See what you can do for people. Do something for them that will help in a small way to build the relationship and then they could want more services. Groups on Facebook.
- Choose a niche. Keep things focused.
- Watch out for scope creep — when your scope of work gets bigger and bigger after it has already been agreed upon by the client in the contract. When you are a freelancer, you are the project manager as well.
What to do if client says they want to build it themselves on SquareSpace/Wix?
What is Semantic UI?
Similar to Bootstrap. More elements. Different flavor.
SpeakerDeck.com to embed slideshows
Language…ethics…Accessibility and Assistive Technologies. Intent of the developer may disconnect with the user experience. Especially when users may have certain disabilities. Speech based technologies could use design help.
Could make an app that helps Anita’s students.
Sergey’s blog post on Accessibility

This font helps dyslexic people read more easily: https://www.opendyslexic.org/
Show and Tell:
Bootstrap Studio
Brandon’s Website: Built using Bootstrap Studio (based on Bootstrap)
- using media queries to make the site responsive on different screen sizes
- Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10SwsoYNkVc
- Clean, Simple, Elegant
Toni-Anne’s website: https://rickettscontentmanagement.com/
Sergey’s website/blog: https://sergeome.com/blog/
(on AWS / static hosting / hexo engine in Node.js / jekyll in Ruby / disqus)
