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First Blog Post [follow-up]

AI

Not going to lie, I hated that I used AI to get most of the legwork done on the website. Even though the agent mode was really cool to use for the resume and blog sections, it felt like I wasn't learning anything – which is true. I was just prompting the AI agent over and over and saying things like:

It was cool in the moment, but I think that solely depending on it is too much of a cheat – at least I cheated myself out of learning. I know I'm not a web developer by trade, so I don't have to learn these things, but still I should at least grasp the fundamentals and think about how I would solve these problems.

And so, I am switching my static site generator (SSG) framework to 11ty (pronounced 'eleventy') from Next.js. Even though Next.js is modern and sleek, I found it to be a beast to learn in my free time, especially when it came down to learning React, TailwindCSS, Typescript, and more all at the same time. I'll admit, it was ambitious of me to try to do everything without any experience while in graduate school and working full-time!

Ideally, I wanted to get a website that could help me express my hobbies, thoughts, and interests up and running with minimal friction. I think web development is cool and all, but I don't have the time to fully learn it and get it the attention that it demands. That is unless I want to pivot my career into full-stack development...

11ty

My friend James suggested that I look into 11ty because it was simple to setup and get going. You can use many different markup and template languages.

# install the package
$ npm install @11ty/eleventy

# run a local eleventy server to generate the html files (watches for changes)
$ npx @11ty/eleventy --serve

That's it. I love how fast and responsive the web server is too because I can make changes and immediately see the result – it's way different from work because I never get to work with any cool frontend things. I'll admit that I cheated a little bit by using the official blog template. I was a bit underwhelmed with the documentation, to be honest, but I do know that there is plenty of tutorials and blog posts online to help me get started. I was just in the mood to go go go.

Don't worry, I will be going through with more follow-up posts to talk about what I'm learning, what I think is confusing, and what I think is interesting.

TLDR; I had grand plans to learn Next.js (and the accompanying tech stack), but I am going to be scaling back with 11ty to focus on the blog and tech component of my personal website.