Building 20 -- A Year in the Making

In the months leading up to the construction of the Facebook campus's new Building 20, I was pursuing a project of my own: run 500 miles in 2014. After I finished each run in front of Building 19 -- the company gym -- I also took a photo of Building 20 emerging from its scaffolding across the highway.

Here is the resulting time lapse.

Fri Mar 28 2014 (1 / 61)

First 5mi+ run in a while. Inexcusable.

4: 0.4
3: 6.0.

Building this post!

This was also an interesting experiment to try out Jekyll's Javascript embedding feature. To summarize the choices I made:

• Everything is implemented via React
• Manual step to process JS: babel --presets /usr/local/lib/node_modules/babel-preset-react public/js/src/ --out-dir public/js/build/

There are several improvements I could make here: browser-side transformations, build scripts, etc. I chose to forego them all and also incur the cost of some antipatterns (e.g. checking in build/ contents), just to isolate the behaviors of Jekyll.

A few helpful articles I referenced while making of this post:

• Official Jekyll documentation
• User-created Jekyll summary that's very useful and very frank
• Tip on implementing "Read More" on the generated homepage
• Debugging "Read More": Restart jekyll serve when updating excerpt_separator
• Debugging excerpt_separator: Switch the markdown renderer out of redcarpet

Note: This post was cleaned up and finally published on 19 Jan 2016.