I’ll be honest, I’m a junior level developer. There’s absolutely no reason to pretend I’m not. I’m okay with admitting it because I’m learning every day and I’m becoming better with every tick of the clock. The reason I know I am getting better is because with every single project that I take on, I try and learn, incorporate, or perform a something that I hadn’t done before.

As a complete beginner I as happy to make a contact form function properly, or to create a captcha that actually worked. Nowadays, though, it’s different. Nowadays I am trying to learn new software or a new take on a language—you know, something interesting.

As part of my weekly ritual, I watch Devtips For Designers. It’s a weekly Youtube channel by a pretty great guy called Travis Neilson. He’s been working on a weekly series where he creates a professional looking website from start to finish. When I first started watching it, he kept referring to a platform called Jekyll. I didn’t know what it was but I just chalked it up as another trendy CMS.

Boy was I wrong

Jekyll is so much more than a trendy CMS. It’s safe, fast, secure, and even better, incredibly easy to use. If you’re familiar with any sort of MVC framework then you’ll have the templating language down, making the only curve the file structure, which is incredibly easy to understand! The most difficult part for me was setting up my Sass file structure. This is my first time using Sass but that’s for a different post!

I like the idea of not being on a database driven CMS and I absolutely love the idea of writing these posts in Markdown which any Redditor is familiar with already so it seems as if Jekyll is the perfect platform for me. What are your thoughts on Jekyll? Tweet me at @_ellenbrook on Twitter and let me know. Cheers.

Edit: I just deployed this without writing what layout to use in the front matter. I guess there is a little bit more of a learning curve than I thought. :-)

Edit: Okay, maybe I’m just tired, but I committed something without defining the excerpt. I promise Jekyll isn’t hard, guys! It’s just me.