After completing Codecademy's "Make a Website" lesson, I decided to go explore a side track to look under the hood of the Bootstrap framework used in the lesson. I'm not going to dive deep (yet), but I wanted to break it down into a short list of names I expect to encounter again as I explore.

The actual run-time components of Bootstrap appears to be two Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files and one JavaScript (JS) file. One of the two CSS files is an optional theme. This confirms that Bootstrap has no client-side requirements, just a web browser that can understand standard CSS & JS files.

On the developer side, things get more interesting.

Grunt is the build system used by the Bootstrap project to build the project code, the documentation files, and run the unit tests.

It's not clear if the JavaScript files are worked on directly, but the CSS is definitely not. It is done with Less and compiled to CSS. Some parts in the documentation listed "Less/Sass" implying Sass is a similar thing. Maybe look into this later.

Once the product is rebuilt, the JavaScript code is automatically reviewed by JSHint. Then tests are executed in the PhantomJS headless JavaScript runtime orchestrated by QUnit testing framework for JavaScript.

The product documentation pages were generated by Jekyall. Don't know what the input for Jekyall would look like, but the output is static HTML pages. It claims to be the engine behind GitHub pages, so I know I'll run into this again when I explore GitHub.

Several package managers were listed. Looks like NPM is required for actually working on Bootstrap itself, though it can also be used for projects consuming Bootstrap. Bower and Composer are two other package managers that seem to apply only to Bootstrap consumers.

That's the first cut. Some things are still fuzzy, and some things I thought were clear may actually be wrong. We'll see!