I’d been running on Eleventy for a while now, but I’ve decided to move on. After weighing the pros and cons with Claude, I’ve landed on Astro.
Why I’m leaving Eleventy
Eleventy is a great tool, and I still highly recommend it. But for better or worse, I’ve been bitten by the React bug, and I want to start writing more React and incorporating it into my personal site. It can be done with Eleventy, but it requires jumping through some hoops—and even then, it’s not really what Eleventy is built for. Finding a tool where React (or another framework) is part of the ecosystem makes more sense to me.
The other thing that leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth is that Eleventy has been acquired by Font Awesome. I don’t have anything against the company, or against Zach for selling it. Eleventy (now renamed Build Awesome) looks like it’s still open source, but they’ve introduced a paid version too. It scares me that at any moment the tool my website is built on could stop being free.
Why Astro
As I mentioned, Astro is designed to work with React and other frameworks out of the box, and I like the idea of sprinkling React components throughout my site. The switch from Eleventy to Astro was mostly a one-to-one conversion, so the learning curve was fairly small.
Astro also seems pretty popular, and I like staying aware of the more widely used tools to keep current with emerging tech—though admittedly that’s becoming less of a concern now that I’m folding AI into my workflow. Fittingly, I had Claude handle the conversion from Eleventy to Astro.
Where’s the Design?
I’m jumping on a bandwagon here too. I hadn’t redesigned in a while and was getting the itch, so this felt like an opportune time. But rather than unveiling a new design in one big push, I’ve decided to do a live redesign. That means things will look ugly for a bit, and I’m okay with that. I’m not sure anyone reads this blog anyway 🤣! A live redesign will be less stressful and let me poke at things slowly.