Au revoir, Eleventy

I learned about the static site generator Eleventy in the spring of 2018 from a colleague of mine. It had just released version 0.3.1 when I built the first Eleventy-based version of this website.

Ever since, it’s been my go-to tool for all my website needs. It would be an understatement to say I’ve enjoyed building sites with it. Its simplicity and the full control it provides have been unchallenged and I haven’t felt the need to even look elsewhere.

I’ve built dozens of websites with it in the past 6 years. I’ve written about it (according to 11ty Bundle’s listing, I’m a top 10 author which is kinda cool), taught others how to build sites with it and talked about it in various meetups.

Now, Eleventy is no more. Yesterday, it was rebranded as Build Awesome with a start of a crowdfunding campaign by Font Awesome.

Eleventy becomes Build Awesome. The engine stays the same. The scope grows.

It’s going to a direction I won’t follow. Almost everything in that campaign is making me feel that the direction is not towards something I care about. It’s corporate, it’s product and it’s about features I don’t care about. While I don’t believe big changes will come to the core static site generator, I’ve seen this kind of change enough times to know when it’s my time to part ways.

1.5 years ago I wrote about how it’s important for me that I have limited amount of external dependencies for building my website:

Eleventy itself is also a 3rd party dependency but since it’s a Javascript library that I download to my computers when I install it, it’s not gonna be able to “just disappear” like a SaaS service like Notion could.

I’m really happy about that: I’ll pin my Eleventy to the current version and store a forever copy on my computer so I can keep using it in the future as well.

In a fast moving technology industry having been able to use the same tool for almost 6 years is amazing. Zach has been an excellent developer and driver for the project and the amazing community has been a key reason for me to get so excited about the tool itself. And in this economy, I can’t blame anyone for wanting to figure out a more sustainable way to finance their work.