Particle Homepage

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What did you guys use to create the particle.io homepage?

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@Carsten4207 Jeff here, part of the team that was responsible for the website redesign. Here’s how the stack breaks down:

  • We decided to use Node + Express.js as the framework to power the website. Before this, our website and IDE were one monolithic rails app, and we took this as an opportunity to split them apart, and use Node for both performance reasons & to move towards standardizing our stack across our applications (Most of our other projects run on Node, like our API!).

    For a time, we were considering going fully static with the website, and using something like Metalsmith. However, we wanted the flexibility of running code on a server available if we ever needed one.

  • We chose Gulp to run automated deploy tasks for the website. This includes minifying/fingerprinting assets, uploading images/stylesheets/js to S3, running a local dev server that watches for file changes, and more. It’s a great tool that uses streams to quickly run tasks for you.

  • For our front-end framework, we’ve started to really standardize our apps around Bourbon & Neat. What’s great about these tools is that instead of polluting your markup with classes to create the responsive grid, Neat uses SASS mixins to move all of that logic into the CSS. Makes for much cleaner HTML! They also have some very helpful, reusable mixins to take care of pesky CSS tasks (Can I get an amen for clearfix?!)

Does that answer your question? Any other things you were wondering about specifically?

Thanks,

Jeff

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