---
title: A static site generator should be your next language learning project
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2017/program/proposals/366
beginning: '2017-10-07T13:30:00.000-07:00'
end: '2017-10-07T13:50:00.000-07:00'
presenters:
- name: John SJ Anderson
  affiliation: Infinity Interactive
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/355
  gravatar_id: 53ac84863938e5f4b28b2d2a2b4a81fb
  biography: John is the VP of Technology for Infinity Interactive, a technology consultancy
    and bespoke software development shop. When he's not madly trying to keep up with
    the pace of change in Javascript development, maintaining Perl modules, or tweaking
    his Emacs config, he likes to play around with new languages like Swift and Rust
    and write about himself in the third person.
---

When learning a new language, some folks prefer to read the language documentation, or work through simple exercises like you might find on <https://exercism.io> -- but I prefer to have something more like an actual project. I find that holds my focus a little better, and that I do a better job of absorbing the new language syntax and features if I'm using them for something *real*.

In this talk, I'm going to outline why writing a static website generator is the perfect task for this sort of language learning project. I'll cover the code you'll need to write in order to develop a simple template-based website generation system, and show how this particular project actually manages to hit all the points you need to understand to claim basic understanding of a language.
