Hello World!

Here's my obligatory first post. It has been a long time in the making. So, here is a little bit about how this site got here...

I knew in 2012 after I finished my Masters and my daughter was born that I wanted to start writing. I refused to use an off the shelf CMS at first, attempting to build my own CMS. That's when the reality of being a full time dev, father, and husband hit hard. When I realized the DIY CMS was a pipe dream, I bailed to Wordpress, and just as it was all set up, I read a discussion from HN that made me fear the security of Wordpress (this fear was later validated when I saw how many random attempts were made on /wp-admin in my nginx access log).

I wanted a place that I could host all sorts of custom dev projects without restriction, edit with freedom, and serve files fast on slim hardware. I settled on the idea of a static site generator. As a node.js enthusiast with existing node projects to host, I wanted to work with node here, and investigated all of the prevailing options, including DocPad, Hexo, Assemble, and Wintersmith. Then, I found Metalsmith. I was hooked. It felt like the spirit of Express' middleware and Gulp had decided to birth a static site generator, and I loved it. I built a slick pipeline with a number of plugins that did everything I wanted (more on that later). Then, I found UIKit. I had found my replacement for Bootstrap. It had all of the bells and whistles I wanted, and it was built with Less, so I can eventually theme it in a pure node environment (I hear that the current version of Sass for node lags behind the ruby implementation).

I spent the next few weeks putting together what I wanted my initial draft of the site to be. The 2015 Global Game Jam made me kick it into high gear to get my server back in order. The site was live with minimal viable functionality, including socket.io for multiple multiplayer games. Since then, I spent time tweaking my nginx config, setting up SSL, optimizing for SEO, automating deployment, and now writing this post. Plenty of fodder for future posts, believe me.

I hope to make this an interesting place to share and learn. Thanks for stopping by, San Diego!