Brinker Web Design is my personal development portfolio and technical writing hub — built intentionally to be fast, secure, low-maintenance, and scalable without the overhead of traditional CMS platforms like WordPress or Drupal. This project showcases my engineering approach to building custom static sites that remain flexible and future-proof.
Looking for client work examples? Explore my full portfolio including projects like Abraham’s Men’s Products and 3rd Coast Appraisal.
Why Jekyll?
When selecting the foundation for my own site, I wanted a system that offered:
- Lightweight performance without PHP, MySQL, or server-side bloat
- High security by removing exploitable CMS frameworks
- Full control over templating, theme structure, and build system
- Fast deployment directly through Git
- Markdown-first content creation for easy blogging
- Semantic URL structure for clear, SEO-friendly permalinks
- Scalable architecture without monolithic CMS constraints
Jekyll provided the perfect balance — static output, fast builds, and complete engineering freedom.
Evaluating Alternatives
Before committing to Jekyll, I explored other approaches:
- Angular paired with a Symfony backend
- Pure PHP frameworks
- JavaScript-heavy SPA stacks
All of these were capable, but each carried more operational overhead, dependency management, or complexity than I wanted for a personal site that needed to remain fast, minimal, and easy to scale.
By removing databases, patch cycles, plugin updates, and runtime dependencies, Jekyll keeps the operational footprint extremely lean.
Custom Jekyll Architecture
The site uses a proprietary CSS grid system, custom SCSS structure, Liquid templates, and modular content organization.
Key engineering decisions:
- Custom collection types for portfolio items
- SCSS preprocessing with a centralized design system
- Liquid partials for reusable layout components
- Gulp-driven task automation for builds and deploys
- Git-based deployment pipeline for versioned releases
- No database — 100% static output
- Instant deploys and near-zero maintenance overhead
This architecture keeps the site performant today and flexible enough to expand into new content types and sections later.
Using Yeoman for Project Scaffolding
I’m a strong believer in automation and repeatable processes. To streamline setup, I used the Jekyllized Yeoman Generator:
https://github.com/sondr3/generator-jekyllized
Development Dependencies
All of these were already part of my standard development environment:
- Ruby
- Bundler
- Node.js
- Yo (Yeoman)
- Gulp
Installing the environment and scaffolding the project was straightforward:
npm install
bundle install
From there, I customized:
- YAML configuration for site settings and collections
- Portfolio collections for project case studies
- Liquid templates and includes for shared components
- SCSS architecture for the proprietary grid and theme
- Gulp tasks for compilation, optimization, and deployment
Credit to https://github.com/LeaVerou/css3patterns for CSS background pattern snippets.
Results
Brinker Web Design delivers exactly what I wanted:
- Lightning-fast load times
- Minimal attack surface with no live admin UI
- Markdown-based blog workflow for technical posts
- Fully custom CSS grid and visual system
- Automated Gulp/Git deployment
- Clean, SEO-friendly structure and semantic markup
The result is an elegant, efficient platform for showcasing my work and writing about web development — with the freedom to evolve the design and content model over time without being locked into a traditional CMS.