11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good

Event

The first-ever #11tyConf caught me by surprise, as I only found out about the conference on Mastodon while it was already in progress. That’s why I missed the first two talks, but I can watch those too, because all talks are available online. And watch I will, but for now, rest assured I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen live.

Talks & Speakers

  • “The Future of 11ty” by Zach Leatherman
  • “Hints & Suggestions (First, Do No Harm)” by Miriam Suzanne
  • “11ty and Large-Project Tooling” by Paul Everitt
  • “Digital Frontiers, IndieWeb Cowboys, and A Place Online To Call Your Own” by Henry Desroches
  • “You’re Probably Doing Web Performance Wrong” by Sia Karamalegos
  • “Building a Town That Doesn’t Exist” by Dan Sinker
  • “11ty Sites for People Who Don’t Think they are Web Developers” by Adrianna Tan
  • “Don’t Fear the Cascade” by Mayank
  • “Managing content management (with no vendor lock-in): Git CMS and static API generation, together at last!” by Liam Bigelow and David Large
  • “Come to the light side: HTML Web Components” by Chris Ferdinandi
  • “Chinese Type Systems” by Ivan Zhao
  • “Light mode versus Dark mode” by Sara Joy

(Short) Summary

It was an interesting mix. Certain talks you could easily see at any regular web conference, others have been more focused on the 11ty static site generator. The spectrum covered by the 11ty talks was already quite unexpected: From small, as in, you can do that, to big, as in, you can do that‽

Needless to say, I was delighted to see those big #IndieWeb vibes from Henry.

When Dan talked about what it means to build a town that doesn’t exist, I was just flabbergasted. This talk added another meaning to making websites real good: Instead of trying to be perfect in web development terms, focus on having brilliant content, and then make sure to get the content out there for others to see.

Given that I’ve liked the ‘C’ in CSS since day one, seeing Mayank’s talk was truly soothing.

Sara closing the day with a dark mode deep dive resonated with me, because that’s a topic I myself went in more than six levels deep not too long ago.