hello world. hello, world?

Its been a while since i’ve been on.
Three years exactly.

I fucking did it. Finally.

I wanted something minimal, clean, & simple - let the content speak for itself. I wanted a place to experiment, write and post random musings, and an elegant way to display my works, all wrapped up together seamlessly and within a system thats easy to manage, update, and super fast.

I built this site on Jekyll, gulp, bower sass ( less sucks ) & node. Quite different from what I’ve been used to developing in, coming from back end tech in the likes of php + mysql, wordpress as my cms of choice, and applications like CodeKit/Koala/PreProsMixture to handle front end optimizations and preprocessing. It’s quite refreshing switching to a “static” site, and don’t get me wrong - having an app that handles the heavy load is nice - but not every developer I came across had access to said application, and thus the jump to open tools like Gulp ( Grunt sucks ), Node & Jekyll came about.

Why Jekyll, and not X, Y or Z, or even plain old Markdown? Jekyll is configured for blogs right out the box, and with a few tweaks it became perfect for portfolio use - eventually churning out this system into a front end framework named Juice - which you should check out! But honestly, no reason really - just wanted to try something different, and will probably rebuild this with yeoman, middleman, brunch, hugo, hexo, prose or the like - just cuz.

My portfolio is currently hosted on Github, entirely open sourced for all those curious, and optimized even further with Cloudflare - which I write about here on how I got 99/100 pagespeed results.

After countless revisions, scrapping it all and starting from scratch, it’s finally live and it feels awesome. Feel free to give me feedback on it and let me know if you think I can improve it any way!

Note to self: Gots to rebuild juice and this to be way tinier, stripped of nonsense, and completely pluggable - maybe something like yeoman or middleman for CLI feedback, perhaps use slushjs for gulp?