At Rose City Robotics, we believe your tools should reflect your values. That’s why we created an open-source portfolio and blog site template along with a course and step-by-step guide to help you through the process.
Our new free course Build Your Professional Portfolio Website: From Code to Deployment walks students, engineers, and career changers through setting up their own GitHub-backed site using our open template.
This template is powered by Bridgetown, a static site generator built for developers, open-source contributors, and long-form thinkers written in Ruby.
This wasn’t just a technical choice. It was a philosophical one.
1. Open Source: Community Knowledge Sharing
As an open-startup, RCR is committed to transparency and public contribution. Bridgetown is fully MIT-licensed, well-documented, and built by a community that shares knowledge as much as code. Our own portfolio-website-bridgetown
repo is part of that and meant to be forked, modified, and expanded.
Open-source tooling matters because it’s inspectable, hackable, and teachable. Whether you’re a seasoned engineer or just starting to document your robotics projects, you should be able to trace how the tool works, and make it your own.
2. Ruby: Elegant, Approachable, and Joyful
I personally love Ruby as a programming language. It’s expressive, beginner-friendly, and has a thriving ecosystem of developer-first libraries. For teams that value clean syntax and developer happiness, Ruby is hard to beat.
Even if you’re not a Rubyist (yet), that’s okay. Bridgetown keeps most complexity out of the way. You can write your content in Markdown, tweak a few config files, and be publishing within minutes without knowing or writing any Ruby.
But if you do want to dig deeper, the Ruby layer is there — waiting for you to explore plugins (gems), components, and full-stack extensions. It scales with your curiosity.
3. Bridgetown: Built in Portland, Backed by Real Devs
We chose Bridgetown not just for the features, but because it’s made by real developers solving real problems, right here in Portland. Jared White, the project’s creator and lead maintainer, brings a pragmatic, community-centered mindset that resonates with RCR’s mission.
Bridgetown is:
Static-first, dynamic-optional: You can deploy it as a static site or add interactivity with Roda.
Flexible in design: Themes, layouts, and reusable components are easy to manage.
Content-forward: Markdown posts, blog taxonomies, and custom collections are built-in.
It’s a toolkit for builders, whether you’re writing technical deep dives, showcasing open-source work, or publishing robotics project updates.
4. Low Barrier, High Ceiling
The beauty of Bridgetown is that it works at multiple levels:
Beginner: Write posts in Markdown, tweak your site title, and push to GitHub.
Intermediate: Add custom layouts, tweak asset pipelines, pull in project data.
Advanced: Add Ruby gems, use dynamic routes, or scale to full-stack applications.
This flexibility mirrors the learning curve we promote at RCR — start hands-on, go deep when you’re ready.
5. Portfolio, Blog, and Open Source Hub in One
The template site is built to do more than look pretty. It’s a developer portfolio, a writing platform, and a showcase of open-source technical work.
It’s not just a site, it’s a mirror of our work, our ethos, and our craft.
🧠 Learn to Build Yours: Free Online Course Now Available
Want to build your own Bridgetown-powered site from scratch?
Check out our free, open-source course I just launched: Build Your Professional Portfolio Website: From Code to Deployment
In just a few hours, you’ll:
Fork and deploy a production portfolio website
Personalize your site and contact information by editing a simple config file
Customize article content, design, and layout using Markdown
Publish blog posts, project pages, and more — all from GitHub for free
This course gives you a professional edge — and you keep full ownership of the code and walk away with a free, modern, public-facing site backed by a real open-source repo.
This course requires no prior web dev experience, just a GitHub account and a willingness to build.
Final Word: Tools That Reflect What We Stand For
Build a real robot. Ship a real repo. Engineer boldly.
That mindset extends beyond hardware. With this course, we’re supporting an open-source platform for engineers to publish, share, and lead.
Duncan Miller
Learning and Impact
Duncan is a software engineer and FIRST Robotics coach with over 20 years of experience as an education technology founder. He earned an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College and works at Portland State University as a mentor for tech startups and a judge at innovation competitions. Duncan lives on an extinct cinder cone volcano with his wife and two children in Portland Oregon. He is passionate about artificial intelligence, robotics, climate solutions, open startups and social entrepreneurship.