It was a revelation several years ago when I created my portfolio website in WordPress. I could choose a template, upload some photos, write some content, and magic would happen. And then I became a web engineer specialized in all things JavaScript so naturally I had the throw some pretty neat technologies into the blender and see what I could make.

As it is with art, you have to practice new things on the side to help guide your vision forward else you'll be come stagnant and write nothing but PHP for the rest of your life. It's not fun. Node.js is fun. And Node.js gives me the opporunity to write an application that gets rendered on the server, handed off the client, and then bootstrapped onto the client and turned into a full web-application. We call this an universal (or the more old-hat term being isomorphic) application.

All of the view are written in React.js, Facebook's gift to the web-dev world, and state management is maintained by a library called Redux.

If you're interested at all in any of the specifics, be sure to grunt and moan on the GitHub repo!