Rebuilding this site with Eleventy

I recently rebuilt this website with Eleventy, a small and flexible static site generator. It takes Markdown, data, and templates and turns them into a fast set of HTML pages. There is very little machinery between an idea and a published page, which is exactly what I wanted for a personal site.

Why Eleventy

The previous version of my site made publishing feel like more work than it should. Eleventy gives me structure without prescribing how everything must be built. The content stays in plain Markdown, Nunjucks handles the reusable layouts, and the result does not depend on a client-side framework to display a page.

That makes the site easy to understand and easy to change. It is also quick to build, inexpensive to host, and pleasantly boring in the best possible way.

More than a portfolio

I think of this website as an open innovation notebook rather than a conventional portfolio. It brings together three parts of my work and interests:

• Projects document useful experiments, prototypes, and tools I have built.
• Writing is where I can capture what I learned while the details are still fresh.
• Media collects the books, podcasts, and series that have influenced what I am thinking about.

The design follows the same idea. It is deliberately dark, editorial, and focused on the content. The homepage acts as an index, while each section can grow independently as I add new work.

What comes next

The immediate goal is simple: publish more often. I want to share projects before they feel completely finished, write shorter field notes about emerging technology, and keep a useful record of experiments that might otherwise disappear into a repository or a folder.

Moving to Eleventy is not the interesting part by itself. The interesting part is having a website that is simple enough to stay out of the way—and useful enough that I keep returning to it.