Good Work Cafes
Tags
project
remote work
travel
engineering
Description
When
Jan 1, 2019
Where
San Francisco, Mexico City, and everywhere
I'm not a big fan of working from home (too many distractions) or co-working spaces (too much commitment, not enough variety), so cafes are usually where I sit down to work every day. I like that my commitment is just the price of a cup of coffee and that I can mix things up a bit every day with a new working space.
But when I get to a new city I'm always starting from scratch figuring out which cafes have fast wifi, power outlets, and an overall work-friendly environment.
Back when I was living in San Francisco, my friends and I made it a point to try and visit every cafe in the city. We kept track of them all in a big shared spreadsheet we called "Cafe Grind".
Once I went nomad, I kept adding cafes to the spreadsheet wherever I went. Eventually the sheet was too big and covered too many cafes to make choices with quickly.
That was the impetus for https://goodworkcafes.com/
Good Work Cafes started as a Google Sheet. Several friends and I who like working from coffee shops got in the habit of recording each new cafe we visited and rating them by their wifi speed, availability of power outlets, and coffee. Basically factoring in everything you need to sit down and get a few hours of productivity in.
As a fun side project between freelancing gigs, I started working on this website to make browsing the cafes faster and easier. I added filters, search, and map functionality. My friend Brent Bovenzi contributed as well, especially to making the map icons better and improving the Search UX.
The website still uses Google Sheets as a backend and is hosted for free on Netlify. My only cost is the domain, about $12/year. Once a day a CircleCI job runs on GitHub that downloads any new cafes and re-builds the website.
The website is entirely static, which makes it so cheap to host, and thanks to Gatsby the navigation between pages is super fast as well.
One challenge as the number of cafes on the website grew was keeping the main page responsive. Initially all cafes were loaded on the main page which slowed down scrolling to a halt and made the website take a very long time to render. This was solved by adding in a dynamic-scrolling component that only loads the cafes you're currently looking at. The end result is super fast and smooth scrolling.
###Software used:
Sass-- CSS styles
Gatsby-- Static site builder
Google Sheets-- Backend
Netlify-- Hosting
CircleCI-- Continous deployment and site updates