This sloth’s relaxation game is my new life goal. Spotted at 

Sunday Slothsday

The only thing where you need a big group of people to do something is when you’re building an Amish barn.

Amish Barn

At first glance, five minutes and fifty-five seconds seems like a pretty arbitraty unit of time to measure something by. Does it read better as 1 “Bohemain Rhapsody”?

I had a goal to show off how to create and deploy a website as fast as possible -- and after a few tries, I couldn't do it under five minutes. But six minutes... plenty of time! Especially when you've got a sweet Brian May guitar solo to give you a little boost 4 minutes in.

I demoed these steps at a weekly work meeting, but everyone in the room had about the same background as me, so for you, random Internet stranger, some assumptions:

Assumptions (If you really want to get this done in under six minutes):

If these assumptions don’t apply to you, you’ll need to budget some more time. If you’re just getting started with git or npm, you might need the entirety of 

. If you’re brand new to development, consider loading up the entire Queen discography.

Now that you’ve got a reasonable time bound for this, let’s get to it.

 for this. Gatsby is a React based static site generator. There’s some comprehensive 

from your favorite command line, pick a folder and then:

and once it’s done loading, like magic you’ve got a website at 

Create a new repo at your git host of choice (bitbucket or github). Either of them will give you instructions for pushing up new code, basically:

, but if you’re doing this at “Bohemian Rhapsody” speed for now I’ll just say that Netlify makes Gatsby deploys crazy easy. Sign up for an account, ideally using the login for your git host (github, bitbucket, etc). Once you’re in you’ll see a dashboard with a big “New site from Git” button. Click that then:

The charade of creating a site and deploying it in under six minutes aside, this is awesome for a few reasons:

Once you’ve done this once, you can spin up and deploy static sites to your heart’s content. And these sites are only quasi static, Gatsby is based on the idea of the (JAMstack)[https://jamstack.org/] - JavaScript, APIs, and markup. You can even feed Gatsby content from live sources hosted elsewhere, like a WordPress site or 

 - basically anything with an API endpoint. Even Netlify is only quasi-static - they have features like 

 to deal with most of the tasks you might have needed server side code for in the past.

That’s it. Hopefully you followed along and got a website up and running. If not, at least you got to enjoy some Queen.

Build and Deploy a Website in Under Five Minutes and Fifty-Five Seconds

About a year ago I was ready for a new computer.

I had money set aside to buy one, and was just waiting for the release of the new Macbook Pros. And then they released it... and I didn't get one. I had a number of older Macbook Pros that I 💖, and when I had them you couldn’t convince me to ever use a Windows laptop instead. But in the years that passed since the last owning a MBP, a few things happened on the Windows side:

...and a few things happened on the Mac side. The last MBP I had was a 2012 model and it was great for the following reasons:

So Apple decided to get rid of all of the things I liked, and focus on things I didn't care that much about, like making the computer incredibly light and adding a useless touchbar, while increasing the price.

So instead of a Macbook, I am now the “proud” owner of a refurbished Dell Inspiron 7577.

It’s worth noting here that I have an iPad Pro that I’m pretty enamoured with, and it was a driver for not needing a laptop running MacOS. 95% of what I used MacOS for exists on iOS, and the iPad is lighter, cheaper, and (in some cases) faster than a MacOS running laptop. If the two OSs ever merged, I’d consider getting a Mac laptop again, but until then I’m happy with Mac apps running on an Arm processor and everything running on a much cheaper Intel box.

 I will admit that there's no good Windows replacement for Tweetbot, and not being able to use Sketch is 

, but I am equally annoyed that they won't support Windows. And my favorite writing app, iA Writer, has 

 I try to buy refurbished computers and electronics whenever possible. Best case, they're just a computer someone returned, worst case they failed in some way and then got fixed, but that just means someone else took the early part of the 

 for you. Also, some times you get unexpected free upgrades.

About a year ago I was ready for a new computer. I had money set aside to buy one, and was just waiting for the release of the new Macbook Pros. And then they released it... and I didn't get one. I had a number of older Macbook Pros that I 💖, and when I had them you couldn’t convince me to ever use a Windows laptop instead.

built with coffee

Sunday Slothsday

Amish Barn

Build and Deploy a Website in Under Five Minutes and Fifty-Five Seconds

Dude You Got a Dell