I. Am. Carrico.

Performance matters, knowing this I rebuilt my website to always load on the first packet response. Check out how I did it, from the code to server configuration and beyond.

The first blog post in this series talked about how to use the Mr. Poole Generator to create a custom Jekyll site. The generator packs in many features to create amazing blogs or static sites. Probably the most powerful portion of the generator is the Gulp.js tasks that come bundled in the Gulp tools for Poole.

Jekyll has become one of the best static site generators, rising to popularity in no small part because of its use on GitHub Pages. It is incredibly simple and easy to begin making awesome static sites or blogs, with very little effort. This month I am doing a 4 part series of blog posts on how to create, deploy and automate a site on Jekyll, all while ensuring it is as performant as possible. These tools are all used on my own site and several smaller sites that I have worked on. The code is all available on GitHub.

Every year, thousands of people come to Austin, Texas, for the annual SXSW festival. And each year it sets record numbers for participants and partygoers that attend. What drives droves of people from across the globe to the city for SXSW? The event is so large that there is not a single reason behind its success, but many. Here are a few I find compelling.