Metalsmith is the static site generator I used to make this site and several others. Static sites are a bit trendy right now, I think the main advantages (to me anyway) are simplicity & reliability.

When wordpress was the final word in content based sites, it was super easy to get something up and running, but the technology stack was fairly brittle. For example, I remember setting up my first VPS with virtualmin thinking how magical it was that all this stuff was just configured for me and I could make virtual servers with a few clicks and stuff.. only to discover over the 12 months or so I was running it that keeping it up was somewhat difficult. All it took was for someone to install a compromised wordpress plugin and the whole thing would shit itself.

I totally understand that server maintenance is a thing, and that I wasn't very good at it (or maybe just not committed ?), but for someone merely dabbling in web technologies messing around with server ops required an inordinate amount of time just to maintain the status quo.

Static sites do away with all that because once you've put something together, then you can just push it to a static host and that's it.