I love Refresh D.C.— I’ve been going since I first moved to the D.C. area in late 2007. (Back then I lived in Reston, so it was a serious schlepp to get to the city.)

Sometimes the topics border on “listen to my thoughts about design”—which can be really fun, don’t get me wrong—but given the choice I’d much prefer something more solidly instructional.

Thankfully Trevor’s Compass/SASS presentation dove into the nitty gritty. The majority of his presentation was lines of CSS, before & after the SASS preprocessing. I went into the lecture thinking I wasn’t going to learn much, but was pleasantly surprised. A couple of things were brand new to me, and others I knew about, but didn’t know why I’d want to use them.

Links to the slides: https://speakerdeck.com/u/trevor_davis/p/sass-and-compass-never-write-regular-css-again

Just wanted to make a place where I can share my long-form thoughts. This is long overdue. I used to have a Wordpress blog, but WP comes with a lot of overhead and cruft I don’t really need. It seems like every other week, there’s some new security exploit that requires a full upgrade to patch.

Octopress seems to bring it back to the basics, which I really appreciate. And by skipping the database, it’s ultra-speedy.