SeattleJS Monthly Meetup at Galvanize!

It's the 2nd Thursday of the month, time to hang out with your fellow web developers!

6:00pm: Arrive, have some pizza and a beverage. Network!
6:30pm: A word from our sponsors
6:40pm: Community announcements
6:50pm: Talk one!
7:15pm: Talk two!
8:00pm: End of program, feel free to hang out for a bit.
8:30pm: Social Hour at a nearby establishment TBD

TALK ONE
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Observable: The magic notebook for exploring data
by: Amber Hoak

Observable notebooks are an exciting, new, free web-based platform that perform very similarly to Juypter notebooks for python. These notebooks allow developers to easily import and compute data in JavaScript without a framework. Observable provides a live-coding experience and is a great place for learning, sharing code or building your portfolio. They also provide features for developers to fork, edit, comment, suggest and merge on a current notebook. In this lightning talk, I will go over getting started with Observable notebooks, some gotchas, and creative examples for inspiration.

Amber Hoak works at Microsoft Research in Special Projects group. Her work focuses on data management, analysis, and visualization. She presented a Data Visualization workshop at the largest women based technology conference, Grace Hopper Conference, in October with all content hosted on Observable ( https://observablehq.com/@project-essex/d3-workshop ).

TALK TWO
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Metis: Using Google Sheets as a Makeshift Database for React Apps
by: Ather Sharif

Building web apps using React has become increasingly popular in the past few months. However, considering a short-term project, such as in civic hacking, especially when the clients are non-tech-savvy, the developers can become a bottleneck for updating the website's content. Metis is a Higher-Order Component for React that allows Google Sheets to be used as a makeshift database, enabling non-tech-savvy users to perform content addition, modification, and/or deletion with ease.

In this talk, we'll explore the integration of Google Sheets in a React app using Metis. We'll discuss the use cases of when such an integration could be beneficial as well as scenarios where it would be ill-advised.

Ather is a Ph.D. Student at the University of Washington studying Human-Computer Interaction and Accessibility. He is also a Software Engineer at Comcast, and Founder and Researcher at EvoXLabs. Ather is a civic hacker and was the 2015 Philadelphia's Geek of the Year.

OUR HOST
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Galvanize is the learning community for technology and a community of professionals and entrepreneurs in the tech industry, created through Data Science and Software Engineering courses, a shared working space, and diverse events.

OUR SPONSOR
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About Formidable Formidable is a Seattle, Denver, Phoenix, and London-based engineering consultancy and open source software organization, specializing in React.js, React Native, GraphQL, Node.js, and the extended JavaScript ecosystem. For more information please visit formidable.com.