New year, new Resource Hub

[Jared Hasen-Klein]

Happy New Year!

It's been awhile since I've written. It's been busy -- in FIRST, personally, and professionally. As I've mentioned before, I'm constantly thinking about how to make the Resource Hub as relevant as possible. This means that over the years, I've dramatically scaled back content and shifted focus. This may seem counterintuitive, but both FIRST and the community have been improving on the content available year after year. The best use of my time is to find those resources that are still lacking -- or that I do differently -- and prioritize them.

Given this approach, it's time to simplify the website. I've gone through a few iterations of the site over the years (starting off with fragmented resources scattered between Google Drive links, links on my old FRC team's website, and Chief Delphi posts), to a dedicated site for each game (remember that really cool Deep Space/Into Orbit branding?), to the microsites on hub.jaredhk.com, to the single page with all the resources from all time.

The latest version of the site has been a static homepage with links to all resources from all time. This served well as a temporary design, but the reality is that the website has had dozens if not hundreds of links, many of them now defunct. The website was coded in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using the Bootstrap framework, and hosted on GitHub pages. This made it super customizable, but also relatively time intensive to update.

Today, I'm happy to share that I'm migrating to a new Google Site. While it may seem that Google Sites is going backwards from where I was, evaluating the content we're doing and the priorities, it made sense. This will enable me to keep costs down, keep updates fast, and make the site safer and easier to navigate. 

Nothing is required on your part. Just go check out the new hub.jaredhk.com, and feel free to send any feedback my way. Keep an eye out next week for the release of the 2023 FRC game (and the resources that'll come with it).

All the best,

Jared