JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development · Changelog Media

11ty goes fully independent

·1 hr 15 min·4 clips

Eleventy's logo cloud includes NASA, CERN, TC39, and W3C, according to Nick Nisi.

1. JS Party talks with Zach Leatherman about Eleventy becoming fully independent in 2024. 2. Jared Santo and Nick Nisi host Zach Leatherman, the creator and maintainer of Eleventy, which matters because he explains both the project and the funding shift. 3. The episode asks how Eleventy can stay open source, self-sustaining, and small without losing its core. 4. Zach says he worked on Eleventy full-time at Netlify for about a year and a half. 5. He says he moved to CloudCannon for about eight or nine months before going fully indie. 6. Zach says the project has a nest egg of donated contributions that bought it runway. 7. He says the current fundraising push is aimed at monthly Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors support. 8. Zach says the next step may be building a product around the tool, but that product is still undecided. 9. He says the plan is likely to involve six to seven months of building. 10. Zach says this is not the best time to go indie because marketing budgets and the job market are tight. 11. Nick cites Eleventy users like NASA, CERN, TC39, and W3C from the project's logo cloud. 12. Zach says the community includes both individual site builders and businesses shipping to production. 13. Zach compares the challenge to Gatsby's venture-backed path and says open-source incentives and financial incentives can diverge. 14. He says Eleventy is different because it is small and does not require funding a large full-time team. 15. Zach says the Netlify era produced some features that were later removed after a community survey showed little use. 16. He says moving away from those underused integrations was easy because community demand was low. 17. Zach describes web components as the lowest-overhead way to add interactivity with minimal toolchain cost. 18. He says he prefers structural, design-free components that can be reused across many projects and design systems. 19. Listeners who care about open-source sustainability, Eleventy, and web platform tooling will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners who want a pure tutorial or a fast-moving news recap may skip it.

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