After much thought and discussion, the Gatsby team has decided not to hold Virtual Gatsby Days in the way we originally planned. While we were very much looking forward to our first digital community gathering, we feel now is not the time to take attention and space away from the Black Lives Matter movement.
Transforming Gatsby Days from a live event into a content series keeps the focus on more important events while sharing the amazing speakers and learning opportunities in a way the community can access when the time is right for each of us. All of the product and program announcements planned for Gatsby Days have been rolled up into an initial blog post, and now we are following with a video series to present the speakers who had been scheduled to share their knowledge during the event. We hope you enjoy. 💜
We look forward to seeing you at our next Gatsby Days, planned for October, though it’s difficult to say right now exactly what form that will take. Follow Gatsby on Twitter to keep up with announcements around our fall Gatsby Days planning, calls for proposals, when registration starts, and other developments.
Benedicte Raae — Co-founder, Senior Developer, and Mom of Lilly Labs — decided to make her own encrypted menstrual cycle app after learning that some of the cycle tracker apps on the market were sharing user data with third parties. Since even the “good” apps still left user data at least somewhat accessible (to the product developers, for example) Benedicte wanted to make an app where even she, as creator, wouldn’t be able to view her users’ highly personal data.
Benedicte decided that the best approach to building POW!, the menstrual tracker app she ultimately launched, would be to offload the encryption work to a backend-as-a-service. She chose Userbase since all data would be end to end encrypted and protected by a unique security key (no password to hack). She also chose Gatsby because she had really liked using it for other projects and also wanted to build POW! as a progressive web app — according to her, Gatsby is the best framework for PWAs. Watch Benedicte’s Gatsby Days Reconfigured video to see how to build a Gatsby site with user authentication and then wire it up to Userbase.
The code for her demo is available on GitHub. Follow Benedicte on Twitter @Raae and check out her new YouTube channel for more videos about making and learning cool new stuff!