I'm glad to see the resurgence in make's popularity among front-end developers. It really is a great tool for not just building apps, but generating files that depend on other files in a declarative way. I manage my website with just make, pandoc, and rsync; and I manage my various ssh configurations with make and m4 (ssh config doesn't have an include directive!). A while ago I wrote an article to help out some front-end dev friends get acquainted with make, maybe someone else will find it useful: http://justinpoliey.com/articles/make-for-front-end-developm...
It's also very handy for anything you write in LaTeX: add figures etc. as dependencies, make targets that run R or gnuplot to produce the figures in the right format, etc.
