Tools I use

How I make the website is most of the point of making this website. In the process, I get to learn about some cool toys. That’s the joy of programming, you just basically sit there and think of stuff, and it pretty much magically pops into existence, as long as you have the right tools to help you.

Ruby

Ruby is my favorite programming language. It is flexible, allowing you to be terse or verbose as the situation allows. It lets you do fun things like monkey patching, and basically makes it fun and easy to express complicated ideas. Lots of fun metaprogramming.

Middleman

Middleman is a really nifty little static site generator. It’s got the right balance of configurability and just doing what it’s supposed to. Plus it’s all ruby!

Emojione & Font Awesome

Most of the icons on this site come from the nifty Font Awesome library. Where those are lacking, they are filled in with Emojione. And if both of those fail me, I have my own crudely-drawn webfont.

I use a hacked up version of rack-emoji to slide all the emoji into the pages.

CoffeeScript

CoffeeScript not only makes JavaScript bearable, it makes it fun! The superb support for closures, greatly cleaned up syntax, loop handling, and all around polish make it the obvious choice for any web-frontend programming.

three.js

three.js is the nicest 3D programming environment I have ever used, web, desktop or mobile. It does what you want with minimal effort, but is still very powerful. When combined with CoffeeScript, it’s pretty fun.

Slim & Markdown

Because I want to write content, not markup.

Atom

Atom is a very nifty text editor. I like it.

Google Fonts

Useful collection of fonts. I’m using Muli, Montserrat, and Bitter.

Let’s Encrypt

Https certificates were supplied by Let’s Encrypt. It’s super nifty. No reason to use plain http anymore.