I read a few articles recently that told me to do stuff differently than how I’ve been doing them. It was right and my static sites are cooler now.

The biggest thing that really helped learn a bunch in the past few weeks was the Static Apps field guide. This was something I was researching because I was left really confused after I was talking to a developer at Code4GoodPBC and he told me that “Rails was originally made for fast prototyping, the only reason these people use it for production apps is because they’re crazy.” I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Sure enough after some digging I found that a lot of developers had the same idea.

After reading through staticapps.org I started using a templating engine built on NodeJS called HarpJS. HarpJS is really rad because it includes a development server and an interpreter for a bunch of different preprocessing languages like Sass, LESS, CoffeeScript, EJS, Jade, and others. This really simplified my workflow so making a static website takes less time to get started now. Starting another project is just a quick harp init away.

All that is totally rad and you should check it out.