It’s been nearly a year since I’ve had any updates to this site other than a couple of logos here and there. I’ve been overloaded between my full-time job, being a full-time MBA student, and helping raise my first child with my wife. The good news is life has been going well, I’ve just been extremely busy. We haven’t been able to travel due to my classes and projects, but have managed to get away for a couple weekends here and there to visit family and friends.

I have, however, been paying particularly close attention to the performance side of websites with my current job. I’ve been researching what goes into web page performance and have found a combination of several things. For many years now I’ve wanted to get away from using a CMS and WordPress for my personal site, as it offers too much and I simply don’t use most of its features.

Instead, I’ve switched to a static site generator, Jekyll. Jekyll is a static site generator and uses a combination of Markdown, Liquid, HTML, CSS to build out websites. It is designed for bloggers who want a simple site. It can be run on any web host, with many users hosting their sites on GitHub Pages. I chose not to do that, as I have other projects and need a web host.

So far, I love Jekyll. It’s quick to learn, and requires minimal effort to create a new post. Best of all, it allows you to build a site and run it locally without having to have a virtual server running - it creates one for you!

One thing worth mentioning - this year, it is my goal to completely move away from Bootstrap and roll my own scaffolding. I’ve been working with CSS Grid and Flexbox more and more lately, pushing myself to keep up with the times. I definitely am liking the benefits, and have a ways to go before I’m as comfortable with them as other languages. I’ll get there. Stay tuned, as I’m sure I’ll write about caveats I find along the way.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for now. While spending quite a bit of time inside due to COVID-19, I’ve been able to slow down and get to some projects that have been on the backburner for a while. It feels great to accomplish projects, regardless of size. Stay safe out there, everyone! Wear a mask, and keep up with the social distancing! It does work, and together, let’s #flattenthecurve.