Examples of great static sites. How do they work? What are the available tools?

For our first meetup I will give an overview of the static site generator landscape, including how they work and the available tools, as well as talk about how various groups benefit, from site owners to users and designer developers. Date and location are tentative at the moment, and I will update.

I would love to hear from people either in the comments or email about your level of technical expertise/familiarity with front-end development and static websites.