About

My name is Dan Ott

I am a freelance web developer. I've worked professionally in the web development field since 1999, and full-time since 2007. I count myself as one of those lucky few people who actually enjoy what they do.

Elsewhere on the internet

You can find me on GitHub, on Twitter, on Pinboard, CodePen or, occasionally, on Flickr.

I also co-founded the Cleveland React Meetup Group in 2019.

Work

Professional

I've been an freelance developer for over ten years, specializing in front-end architecture and development. I have experience building sites using standards-compliant HTML and CSS, React (both SPA and integrated into existing legacy sites), and have built over 25 client sites using Craft CMS. Since 2007, I've worked almost exclusively with Sprokets, a collection of independent creative professionals.

Contact

I'm not currently accepting new contract work, but I'm always interested in what's going on. Hit me up any time at dan at this domain.

Some Recent Thoughts:

How To Post Event Reminders to Slack

filed under netlify, slack, netlify functions, and javascript.

At Virtual Coffee, we have events almost every day, and we hang out in Slack every day! So, it was inevitable that we'd get some sort of event reminders going in Slack. Our first pass was by the late Mike Rogers (we miss you, Mike ❤️). Our events were listed on MeetingPlace.io, so Mike wrote a Ruby app to pull date down from MeetingPlace and post to Slack: Meetingplace Events Bot.

When we moved from Meetingplace to our own CMS, I took the chance to do some upgrades, and convert to Javascript, at the same time. Follow along and we can get some event reminders going for you!

How the Virtual Coffee Coworking Room Works

filed under netlify, coworking, slack, netlify functions, and zoom.

In our Slack for Virtual Coffee, our members had started a practice of Coworking over Zoom. Coworking is a way to share space with other people while still getting work done, and I thought it was very cool. Members would simply post a personal Zoom link saying something like "starting a Coworking session if anyone wants to join." Eventually we made a Slack channel specifically for this.

In chatting with our members, I realized we probably could do a couple cool things to support this a bit better. It’d be nice to have an official Virtual Coffee Coworking setup for Zoom, so I put one together using Zoom, Slack, Airtable, and Netlify Functions. Here's how it's all set up.