Learn React; The Easy Way

Learn React By Building a Blog

This is a 4-hour long introduction to building websites using React.js. This workshop is for people who have experience with web development (html, css, javascript) and want to learn how they can get started with React today. In this workshop, we will take a deep dive and break down react components to teach you how they really work. We will be doing this using a framework that abstracts away a lot of the tedious grunt work needed to take a react app to a production website. Then, you will learn how to host the website you just made, for free, and make it safe with https. The skills you learn in this workshop will be directly translatable into real-world knowledge that you can use to build fast production quality React driven websites.

That’s where Gatsby comes in. Gatsby is my favorite framework for building quick and easy websites that can scale to be as robust as any other React web app. Built on open source, and recently funded for over $3M dollars. Gatsby is used by tens of thousands of developers and organizations and is downloaded nearly ½ million times per month.

Now is your opportunity to get started with React if you were turned off by all of the complexity of dealing with redux and webpack. Spend 4 hours with me and learn how easy and fun it can be to make something awesome with React. 

You can learn more about React on their website. http://reactjs.org/

You can learn more about Gatsby on their website. http://www.gatsbyjs.org/

This workshop is focused on learning the basics of practical React website development. The goal is for you to leave the workshop with a toolkit of knowledge and recourses that you can use to build your own website using React.

Workshop Overview

0. Setting up your development environment
1. Getting to know React
2. Building with components
3. Introduction to styling
4. Data in Gatsby
5. Helpful resources to help you on your React journey

How to Prepare

The further you can get through part zero on the Gatsby website tutorial the faster you will be able to hit the ground running when we start coding. http://www.gatsbyjs.org/tutorial/part-zero/

At the very least I would advise you to try your best at getting Node and npm to run on your computer.

FAQs

What is React?

React is one of the hottest javascript libraries for creating reusable components. If that sounds vague, that’s because React can be used in a lot of ways, to do a lot of things. This workshop will deep dive into one framework that uses React to build static websites that act much like a blog or portfolio website. 

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is an opensource framework that is quickly becoming the standard for building websites and blogs using React.js and GraphQL. Gatsby creates static websites that can be deployed from anywhere. This allows us to get straight to using react without having to worry about data management (as much).

What should I bring to the event?

Your laptop and a charger. Please follow the “How to Prepare” Section above for more info.

Will food be provided?

No, but feel free to bring a snack. Please refrain from anything too smelly, noisy, or disruptive.