To develop locally, three web technologies are used: bower, npm and grunt. Bower is used to manage libraries (like sd.js) used in the browser, npm is used to manage tools used during development, and Grunt is the JS-world-version of Make.
To develop:
$ git clone https://github.com/bpowers/sdjs-example
$ cd sdjs-example
$ npm install
$ bower install
$ grunt serve # this will open up the page in your browser,
# and refresh the contents everytime you save a file
$ grunt build # this will 'compile' the website for putting on the
# web or an internal network - the resulting website
# will not access any external resources