I’m a software engineer at Flywheel, a web infrastructure startup in Omaha, Nebraska.
I’m also a former airborne cryptologic linguist for the US Air Force, fluent in Mandarin. Things you can ask me about include programming, cats, board games, karaoke, and building applications that convert songs into auto-tuned cat meows. Things I’ll have to kill you if you ask me about: the airborne linguist part. Also, I like to make emojis look like they’re farting. 🐈💨
The goal of this talk is to show a basic introduction to serverless web apps without needing knowledge of other unnecessary dependencies or advanced devops expertise.
I’ll be using vanilla JavaScript and Netlify Functions (a simple, but powerful wrapper around AWS Lambda), to build Snowmaha, a simple web app that displays whether or not it is currently snowing in Omaha.
You can’t use Ajax to connect to a third-party api because of CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Scripting). This means that building Snowmaha using only JavaScript is impossible unless some server-side code handles the request to the third-party api. Someone with above-average devops knowledge could setup a Lamda function and enable CORS for your site, but most people aren’t interested in learning how to use AWS Lamda, and why should they be? It has a horribly complex UX! Netlify Functions simplifies the process and sets up CORS for you. Now your site can make an Ajax request through Functions to Lamda and all of a sudden developers that only know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are building “serverless” applications with the power of server-side functionality.
