About

Renaissance Nerd was launched by Jeff Mueller—both randomly AND inauspiciously—on February 5, 2011.

The goal of Renaissance Nerd is to help people interested in a handful of Web-related topics to learn more, educate themselves, and start building something awesome. Everyone’s invited—even people who have never written a single line of HTML.

The site was created for two reasons:

  1. I’m often asked during conversations with people, “Where did you learn all of this stuff?” I wanted to provide definitive answers to questions like those, and now I can point people at a single resource that catalogs all of this junk.
  2. I’ve spent some time recently (re-)learning Ruby, Rails, and how to configure production servers. A lot of the resources for getting started with these concepts are scattered about the Web. I’ve managed to find a lot of high-quality information, and I thought it would be good to share it with those who might find themselves in a similar position.

So, ostensibly, this site is intended to help people who have an interest in the site’s primary topics to learn more, educate themselves, and start building something awesome.

What ARE the Primary Topics?

Here’s a quick—and woefully incomplete—list of what I hope to cover at Renaissance Nerd:

  • HTML & CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Ruby & Rails
  • MySQL
  • Git
  • Markdown
  • The command line
  • UX/IxD
  • Interface design
  • Typography
  • GTD

Where Do I Start?

I started the site with a series of primers. It’s possible that some of these are out of date now, but they serve as good jumping-off points to get started with the primary topics covered on Renaissance Nerd. Here they are in no particular order:

If you find any dead links in any of these articles, let me know.

What’s Next?

That’s up to you. But I’d encourage you to read, learn, and then get to work. Start making, creating, doing, producing, shipping, or whatever you want to call it. And if you have questions, feel free to ask.