Add Eviction Free NYC blog post and link to site

README.md

@@ -209,6 +209,7 @@ Websites built with Gatsby:
 * [Dovetail](https://dovetailapp.com)
 * [Bart van der Waerden Blog](http://bartvanderwaerden.com/) ([source](https://github.com/BartvdWaerden/BartvdWaerden.github.io))
 * [Canella Riccardo - Portfolio](https://canellariccardo.it) ([source](https://github.com/thecreazy/canellariccardo.it))
+* [Eviction Free NYC!](https://www.evictionfreenyc.org/) ([source](https://github.com/JustFixNYC/eviction-free-nyc))
 * [Rafael Belliard's Portfolio](https://rafael.do) ([source](https://github.com/rebelliard/rebelliard.github.io))
 
 ## Docs

docs/blog/2018-04-27-building-eviction-free-nyc-with-gatsbyjs-and-contentful/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,212 @@
+---
+title: Building Eviction Free NYC with GatsbyJS + Contentful
+date: "2018-04-27"
+author: "Dan Kass"
+excerpt: Lessons in building a minimal, low-connectivity site for navigating a daunting legal process.
+tags: ["i18n", "netlify", "case-studies", "contentful"]
+canonicalLink: https://medium.com/@JustFixNYC/building-eviction-free-nyc-with-gatsbyjs-contentful-a0308bfcb866
+publishedAt: "JustFixNYC"
+---
+
+On March 29th, we launched [Eviction Free NYC](http://www.evictionfreenyc.org/) with the [Right to Counsel Coalition](https://www.righttocounselnyc.org/) as part of a campaign to educate tenants living in affordable housing on their legal rights and how to navigate the daunting process of receiving an eviction notice.
+
+In order to build this new resource we applied a [human-centered design process](https://medium.com/@JustFixNYC/co-designing-eviction-free-nyc-b54570c69153) followed by specialized technical scoping in order to determine what was best for our users and build something for this unique context. **That process led us to using GatsbyJS, Contentful, and Netlify!** Below, we've written up how we mapped design to dev, approached different stakeholders, and utilized Gatsby's great flexibility & plugin library.
+
+
+#### **Mapping Design Considerations to Technical Scoping**
+
+![](design-mapping.jpeg)
+*Journey mapping for a tenant organizing process!*
+
+We started this process with a pretty strong sense of our average user’s
+technical capacity and degree of comfort in using a website or app. For the past
+3 years, we’ve been collecting user insights from the [JustFix.nyc Tenant
+Web-App](https://www.justfix.nyc/) and other resources. As you might imagine,
+the majority of our users are coming from mobile devices (**over 95% of
+low-income Americans now have a device that connects to the Internet**) and
+usually do not have a very fast connection to the Internet. We learned from
+user-testing in Housing Court that there is usually little-to-no cell
+reception in the building. We also knew that internationalization (i18n) and
+language localization would be a launch requirement. Previous analytics from the
+Tenant Web-App also informed us to account for older browsers such as Internet
+Explorer 11, given that many older users and nonprofit employees still use it.
+
+For coalition members, the site needed to be incredibly adaptable and easily
+managed from a [Content Management
+System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system), or CMS. The
+RTC policy and coverage areas change on an almost daily basis, and thus required
+a content modelling system that would prevent the site from quickly becoming
+outdated. We also wanted to utilize this system to make it easy for new
+languages to be added and maintained with as little technical knowledge as
+possible.
+
+#### **Our solution: GatsbyJS**
+
+We knew that we would build the site in [React](https://reactjs.org/).
+Developers can build websites quickly and reliably through its modular
+architecture and extensive system of third-party components. React’s simple
+component-based philosophy creates code and structure that just *makes sense*,
+allowing other developers to more easily contribute to the project as well.
+It’s also unobtrusive enough that it can be applied to both large and small web
+development projects.
+
+From there, we looked for different scaffolds that would help us get
+up-and-running quickly. While we’re big fans of
+[create-react-app](https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app) and have used
+it on other projects, due to an aggressive project timeline, we needed something
+that provided a more “out-of-the-box” solution. We wound up building the site in
+GatsbyJS, which is a **React-based static site generator**. GatsbyJS is the
+perfect fit for a number of reasons:
+
+1.  [Static sites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page) load content much
+more quickly than dynamic web applications, which require multiple
+back-and-forth calls to a server in order to display the final composited view
+to the user. They are more easily adaptable for low connectivity / offline
+functionality for this reason. This allows us to provide a faster and more
+reliable experience for tenants utilizing the service.
+1.  GatsbyJS ships with an incredible amount of pre-handled optimization features,
+from prefetching resources to progressive image loading to inlining code blocks
+so they don’t need to be fetched via
+[AJAX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)). There was no way we
+could have achieved this level of optimization on our own in this timeframe.
+1.  A growing plugin library that allows for easy integrations that utilize Gatsby’s
+GraphQL data query system. With these we could easily use things like
+[gatsby-source-contentful](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-contentful/?=conten)
+and [gatsby-plugin-i18n](https://github.com/angeloocana/gatsby-plugin-i18n).
+1.  A growing community of developers sharing resources and best practices. Credit
+is due to [mccrodp](https://github.com/mccrodp) for setting up
+[gatsby-starter-contentful-i18n](https://github.com/mccrodp/gatsby-starter-contentful-i18n),
+a boilerplate that synced Contentful and i18n features together and allowed us
+to hit the ground running.
+
+#### **Using Contentful**
+
+[Contentful](https://www.contentful.com/) is a “headless” [Content Management
+System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system), or CMS.
+Traditional CMS platforms, like Wordpress or Drupal, allow authors and editors
+to easily create websites and publish content such as text articles, image, or
+video embeds. A headless CMS takes those publishing features (and the easy admin
+tools that come with them) and additionally gives you total flexibility as to
+how the website itself is constructed.
+
+In previous projects where we used Contentful, content was loaded dynamically
+(via AJAX) when a user visits the site. GatsbyJS instead pulls content from
+Contentful *as the site compiles* (pre-deploy), not when the user visits it.
+This change creates significantly less server requests after page load and
+further speeds up the site’s final load time.
+
+With Contentful, you define *Content Models* in tandem with coding individual
+pages in order to construct the structure of the site and its content. For
+Eviction Free NYC, some sample *Content Models* are **Providers**, **Housing
+Court Action Steps**, and meta-level page models, such as **LandingPage**.
+
+![](provider-example.png)
+*An example of the Provider content model*
+
+As GatsbyJS compiles the site (either in dev or building for production), it
+will pull content from Contentful and make it available via GraphQL. A file’s
+GraphQL `pageQuery` will then populate your React component’s `props` with the
+corresponding data, creating an incredibly simple pipeline from content → code.
+As an example, here’s the provider portion of a sample `pageQuery`:
+
+    providers {
+      title
+      acceptsRtcCases
+      phoneNumber
+      website
+      hours
+      intakeInstructions
+      address
+      logo {
+        resolutions(width: 100, height: 100) {
+          aspectRatio
+          width
+          height
+          src
+          srcSet
+        }
+      }
+    }
+
+#### **Challenge: Hyper-personalized result pages in a static site**
+
+When a tenant goes to Eviction Free NYC, they answer a simple questionnaire that
+determines a results page. It's tailored to their borough’s housing court
+(including information about room numbers and different parts) and factors in
+their eligibility for legal representation as well as different types of
+eviction proceedings. **This level of personalization is difficult to achieve in
+a static site and manage in a CMS.** We wound up finding a solution that gave us
+flexibility and reuse of content while preserving the static page nature of
+GatsbyJS.
+
+The four variables for generating these pages were language, housing court, case
+type, and eligibility. A quick calculation gave us the basic number of result
+pages:
+
+> **2 languages x 5 different housing courts x 3 different case types x (y/n)
+> eligibility = 60 static results pages**!
+
+This doesn’t include additional pages we built afterwards to account for NYCHA
+tenants and other situations. Here’s an example of what this looks like in
+Contentful:
+
+![](housing-court-example.png)
+
+There are 6 potential pathways that a user could be taken (seen above as
+Holdover, Qualifies; Holdover, Doesn’t Qualify, etc) per housing court. These
+were represented as *arrays of references* to Housing Court Action Steps, which
+are in turn represented in Contentful as editable Markdown snippets. This system
+allows for steps to be reused (see “Brooklyn Housing Court location” above) and for
+third-party content, such as Google Maps, to be embedded in the steps. To
+reorder a step or change a part of the process for a specific court or case
+type, you can simply drag-n-drop things in Contentful!
+
+From there, we had to teach GatsbyJS how to properly render each page based on
+pathway. We did this by implementing the `createPages` function in the [Gatsby
+Node API](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/node-apis/). For each Housing Court Page
+(also per language!), Gatsby creates 6 different pages based on the pathways.
+While our solution had to account for some [limitations in
+GraphQL](https://github.com/facebook/graphql/issues/414), everything wound up
+working as needed.
+
+Feel free to [explore the source
+code](https://github.com/JustFixNYC/eviction-free-nyc) to get a better sense of
+how all this works!
+
+
+#### **Wrapping everything up: using Netlify**
+
+When it came time to deploy, we were very excited to try out a new hosting
+platform called [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) that we’d been hearing a lot
+about. It has a great free tier and is perfect for hosting static sites. We
+simply linked Netlify to a branch in the Eviction Free NYC GitHub repo and it
+compiles and deploys the site with each push. It simplifies HTTPS certificate
+generation and even includes a system for deploying AWS Lambda functions, which
+we used to ship a small Twilio integration for the site's “Save to Phone”
+feature. *(note: we’re actually still using the original
+*[Serverless](https://serverless.com/)* solution, but this code is in the repo
+as a to-do)*
+
+The best feature of Netlify is its ability to utilize build hooks. This allows
+us to trigger a new site build when someone edits or adds content from
+Contentful. Contentful’s [webhook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook)
+functionality will fire an event when content is edited or published. Once you
+link the two together, Netlify will receive the event, rebuild the site, and
+deploy everything. Done!
+
+![](mobile-comps.png)
+*Mobile comps for Eviction Free NYC*
+
+#### In Conclusion
+
+The technical process for building the site went by incredibly fast — this all
+came together in a little over a month! Despite the frenzied speed, we created a
+valuable new service that also acts as a launching pad for future feature
+development and refinement. **It’s already been used by over 1,000 people in the
+past few weeks!** We’re really excited for this site to grow and develop as
+tenants take advantage of this historic new right.
+
+**Footnote: Our code for [evictionfreenyc.org](http://www.evictionfreenyc.org/) is
+open source! [Click
+here](https://github.com/JustFixNYC/eviction-free-nyc) to view the code on
+github.**

docs/blog/author.yaml

@@ -117,6 +117,10 @@
   bio: Developer and Diet Coke enthusiast in Brooklyn, NY
   avatar: avatars/sarah-mogin.jpg
   twitter: "@sarahmogin"
+- id: Dan Kass
+  bio: Co-founder and engineering lead at JustFix.nyc
+  avatar: avatars/dan-kass.jpg
+  twitter: "@JustFixNYC"
 - id: Gatsby Central
   bio: The community for gatsby developers
   avatar: avatars/gatsby-central.jpg