0:00:09 - (Matt): Welcome to Podcast awesome where we chat about icons, design, tech business and nerdery with members of the Fawn awesome team. I'm your host Matt Johnson and today we're diving into another episode of the Nerd show and tell where we get to geek out with our favorite creators at Font Awesome. Zach Leatherman's joining me today and he's the mastermind behind Eleventy, a static site generator that helps make web developers lives just a little bit easier.

0:00:48 - (Matt): And not only that, but Zach and his Eleventy baby are the latest addition to the FontAwesome team. So we're really looking forward to creating awesome stuff with Zach in the future. Today we're talking shop on everything from the origins of Eleventy to the future of independent web publishing and open source funding. Here we are with Zach Leatherman. Thanks for taking some time to hang out today on the Nerd show and tell.

0:01:18 - (Zach): Yeah, absolutely.

0:01:19 - (Matt): Yeah, it was good to say hello for the first time at the first snuggle in October in Bentonville. That was a good time. So what did you think? Some folks are a little creeped out by the snuggle. What? What is this a cult or what? How was that?

0:01:34 - (Zach): That name is interesting. It doesn't bother me. Yeah, it was a great time. I feel like my voice is still recovering from karaoke at this point, but.

0:01:41 - (Matt): Oh man, you brought it. That was quite the rendition of Frank Sinatra's My Way. It was like this huge sing along like yeah, yeah, that's in my range. I could do that one.

0:01:53 - (Zach): Everyone knew that song.

0:01:54 - (Matt): Yeah, that was great.

0:01:55 - (Zach): Y that was a really fun time. That was maybe my favorite night of karaoke that I've ever done.

0:01:59 - (Matt): Oh, for sure. It was a super good time. Obviously you and Dave and Travis linked up. The stars aligned for folks that maybe aren't familiar with Eleventy. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what is a static site generator for the non tech folk like me?

0:02:17 - (Zach): Yeah, for sure. Static site generator is just a sort of a group of tools, a build step that runs to generate a website. Eleventy idea of it came from Jekyll. Jekyll is one of the original static site generators. I don't think that they pioneered the idea of static site generation necessarily, but Jekyll was like 2008 I think when it came out originally and Eleventy didn't start until 2017, so we're a few years behind Jekyll. But that was definitely where the inspiration and the roots of it came from.

0:02:51 - (Zach): And yeah, I think just static site generation was Pioneered by Aaron Swartz. I mean maybe like in 2001 or 2002 wrote this sort of iconic blog post that was titled Bake Not Fry. And it was about running this like pre generated build step to create content that isn't generated on request. It's all baked up front. And then you just shipped the HTML and all the assets to your web server. There's nothing more to serving it.

0:03:25 - (Zach): So it's. You run. It's a lot little. It's quite a bit more secure because there's nothing to. There's no dynamic database portion or any of the sort of extra pieces that you might be, you might associate with a WordPress installation. There's no dynamic plugins to get hacked. There's no administrative access there. That's just HTML files and maybe some other assets alongside. So it's just a very simple way to build websites and it really removes a lot of the moving pieces of it.

0:03:56 - (Matt): Tell me a little bit about when you met Travis and or Dave and how that conversation went. I imagine they're like, hey, you're doing some pretty great stuff. Zach, how did that conversation go?

0:04:10 - (Zach): Dave's emailed me out of the blue earlier this year.

0:04:13 - (Matt): That's usually how it goes.

0:04:14 - (Zach): When we were talking about some of the funding issues on the Eleventy program project, we've been through a bunch of different types of funding. We were full time funded for a while and it was a part time side project for a while. And we tried community funded focus this year and people responded to it very well. But it was still just. It's very difficult to fund an open source project. The incentives are sort of not aligned in the right way and it kind of depends on what kind of project you got. But sure, yeah, it can be very hard to have a project of this size of that scope be full time funded. And that's kind of what the project of a project of that size and scope needs.

0:04:56 - (Zach): Because if it's not, then it languishes. A lot of site generators that were popular even when Eleventy started are no longer maintained. I sort of did a talk on this not too long ago. I sort of looked at the landscape back in 2017 and over half of the popular site generators that were around in 2017 are sort of languishing right now. And so Eleventy does sort of have a unique story of we're still around, we're still iterating, we're still delivering value and we're still maintaining the thing.

0:05:26 - (Zach): I'm pretty proud of that. But we have Tried a lot of different ways to keep the project going. Dave emailed me, and he was like, let's have a conversation about how to not just make eleventy a sustainable project, but how do we make eleventy a thing that can thrive? So we're looking to the next step, and in some ways, it does just feel like a new beginning for the project in a way.

0:05:50 - (Matt): Yeah, that's excellent. All right, quick little commercial break. Let me ask you a question. Do you love icons? Of course you do. You're listening to Podcast awesome, and if you haven't tried Duotone icons, you're really missing out on double the layers and double the style. Well, we've got some big news. Maybe, you know, the Duotone icons were only available in a solid style. Well, we just added the duotone treatment to Light Thin and the sharp icons, too.

0:06:24 - (Matt): But right now you can lock in Pro for $99 a year for the life of your subscription before the prices jump to 120. I mean, come on. It'd be like getting a two for one on Design Magic. So head over to Font awesome, snag that deal, and give your designs that extra pop, because this twice as nice offer won't last forever. So I'm curious about your professional development and how you got into building stuff on the web. Can you tell us a little bit of a backstory behind that?

0:07:01 - (Zach): Yeah, it goes back quite a few years. I think that I maybe made my first website in 1997, but I wasn't a professional web developer until, I think, 2006. But even that is like, getting up there now. Yeah, I think I originally started to make websites just for my friends. It was just like a fun hobby thing. And I was getting into computer programming in high school, and I went to college for computer engineering and realized maybe like, halfway through that I really wanted to do more software development and not hardware stuff. But I did get a degree in computer engineering because it was just maybe too hard to switch at that point. And even the software engineering part of it was just like, I just want to make websites. That was the more fun part of development for me. I really liked the idea of being able to just make something and see it instantly in a web browser and being able to upload it somewhere and have it shared to the world with very low little friction.

0:08:02 - (Zach): I thought that was such an amazing thing. And I think in some ways always been chasing that developer experience of just like, building something, seeing it immediately in a web browser, and being able to throw it on a web server for anybody.

0:08:19 - (Matt): Yeah, for sure. I remember a buddy from years ago, he built a fan site on GeoCities and shared it with me and I.

0:08:25 - (Zach): Was like, how amazing.

0:08:27 - (Matt): I was just like, how did you do that? This is magic. I was like 97 or something like that.

0:08:33 - (Zach): Yeah, yeah. I think that is. That's great. I think that original feeling of being able to share something online that's accessible by anyone, I think is huge. And I think social media in some ways really eclipsed that or maybe took over some of that use case for a lot of people in a way that the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction as the algorithms get more and more prohibitive to the ability to share things online.

0:09:01 - (Zach): Because you can post something on a social media account and just a small number of your followers might see it just because of algorithmic timelines. I think we're. The pendulum is swinging back and we're headed for. I'm hopeful we're headed for another golden age of independent web development.

0:09:18 - (Matt): Right? Yeah. It is interesting how that has shifted slowly over time and people just get accustomed to a new normal. It's like, hey, do you remember back in the day if you had a blog or something like that, you were building basically on your own proper property now? And now it's sort of like a lot of folks have built on someone else's property and now we're subject to whatever, whatever the market says or whatever happens with that network. It's just. It's really interesting times. I'm. I'll be curious to see if it comes back around a little bit more where people have a little bit more ownership over their stuff.

0:09:51 - (Matt): Or maybe people get kind of tired of the algorithm and they want to like kind of distance themselves from that a little bit. I don't know. It'll be interesting years to come.

0:09:59 - (Zach): The algorithmic timeline and the lack of engagement for. From people like that have invested in these sort of siloed social networks is a great opportunity. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it because I think it'll be great for independent developers and independent folks that want to put stuff online.

0:10:18 - (Matt): Crazy times, man. Backing up a little bit. You're working on Eleventy. You're going through different iterations of like funding and things like that. What are you doing in the meantime? Have you got a day to day, a nine to five kind of thing that you're trying to fit Eleventy into that a little bit? What have you been working on a lot over the last five years or so?

0:10:41 - (Zach): Eleventy started as a side project four Years of the project were exclusively side project status. In 2017, I worked for a web development services company called Filament Group, known for responsive design and implementing responsive design front ends. And one of their maybe claims to fame was that they built one of the first large scale responsive web design implementations on the Boston Globe. The Boston Globe.com they catapulted responsive Web design to be a very formal thing. And it seems maybe very obvious now because Responsive Web Design won. But I remember those conversations about you should have a separate site for mobile, like an M dot site for mobile instead of doing a single property, a single website that can serve mobile and desktop.

0:11:30 - (Zach): And in some, I guess in some large companies that question is still unanswered. But I think for most folks it's pretty obvious that Responsive Web design won. And then I joined Netlify in 2020. There was more overlap between my day to day and Eleventy's future. But it was still sort of side project status at that point because I was building websites for Netlify. And then for a while Eleventy went through a.

0:11:57 - (Zach): Maybe like a year I was full time employed by netlify to work on Eleventy. And then that sort of funding dried up at some point because it wasn't contributing directly to the bottom line of the, of the business. And. Right. In many respects that, that can make you very expendable.

0:12:15 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:12:16 - (Zach): And so that is, yeah, not necessarily the easiest thing to go through. The Eleventy went back to a side project and then I worked for a small firm in New Zealand called cloudcannon. Yeah, it's been an ride.

0:12:29 - (Matt): Yeah. For sure.

0:12:30 - (Zach): The last couple of years. Just because I feel like just tech generally is very, I don't know what the right word is, but tumultuous.

0:12:38 - (Matt): Yeah, it is a crazy time. I mean, I imagine, you know, with all the ups and downs with Eleventy and having, having some folks like Dave and Travis come along and say like, hey man, we get it, we've been there. Like, was it a sense of relief where it was like, hey, let's figure out how to partner up and make this thing work and make it float. Like what was that like when you kind of realized, hey, this might be a partnership that's going to work?

0:13:04 - (Zach): Yeah. I had a lot of very long conversations with Dave and Travis and yeah. And it challenged a lot of preconceived notions I had about open source and giving things away and the true longevity of projects given Eleven's moderate amount of success. You get suddenly thrust into these conversations where people are saying, do you want to choose next JS or do you want to choose Eleventy? And I'm like, whoa, this is now a much larger scope of project.

0:13:38 - (Matt): Right.

0:13:38 - (Zach): And competing against hundreds of millions of dollars of investment money. Yeah, that, that just completely changed the conversation in my brain of just like if I want this to be a project that will exist for folks in 10 years time or to be a 10 year project, because that was kind of my original goal to build something that would last 10 years. And I'm on year eight right now. How do we make it over that line when people are considering alternatives and they aren't considering sort of these other nuanced funding decisions that go into it.

0:14:18 - (Zach): A lot of these VC funded things come and go. And why we've seen, I think a lot of this tumultuousness in the tech space right now is because people are throwing things at the wall, you know, and it's either sticking or it's not sticking. And most of the time it's not sticking for that hockey stick growth that they're looking for. And then stuff just languishes and dies and everyone sort of treats this as like the new normal.

0:14:44 - (Zach): Whereas I want to build something that have enough money to pay for itself. We don't need hockey stick growth. We need to pay the bills. And I think, yeah, Dave and Travis are really on board with those goals.

0:14:58 - (Matt): Yeah, I love too hearing about the culture behind that stuff and open source that there's just a lot of, I don't know, there's just like a lot of love and attention in that community. I'm sure there's a lot of jerks too because people. But you know, like people that are volunteering their time to do something because they just, they really love to build things and they want to, they want their product to meet a specific need.

0:15:27 - (Matt): And I just have a lot of respect for folks in that community because it takes a lot of time and heart, especially folks like you. And I'm thinking like folks like Corey with Shoelace like doing this stuff on the side purely out of love and it's not sure. There's you know, plenty of companies like Font awesome that figured out how a way to do paid version and keep open source alive and continue to give stuff away.

0:15:54 - (Matt): But that's not like why people get into open source, you know what I mean? It's like they get into it because of the love of it, which that idea of a sustainable model, a sustainable open source model that Dave's been talking about more recently. Where it's like, what if there's a different way to imagine how to do this to where you know that there's goodwill in the community, there's value to your solution, and you put the word out there and hopefully people are going to reciprocate and say, yeah, we want to support that.

0:16:28 - (Matt): And then you have a suspense, a sustainable model. Then you're not just like throwing paint on the wall to say, oh, geez, what's going to work? I hope somebody will like me. You know, it's like you have purpose and intention and if you have a little bit of Runway and some funding to make that happen, you can be intentional about how you build something so you're building something with real value, you know?

0:16:49 - (Zach): Yeah. You know, I always think about, oh, who is that comedian? He had this joke where he said, if I get good at being a chef, they always want me to do other stuff. They always say, oh, okay, you can make food, you've mastered the, You've perfected the art of making food, but can you farm? And so like, it always makes me think of like, software is like very similar to that. Like, you get good at building software, you get good at delivering value through your software and you make it open source.

0:17:26 - (Zach): And then all of a sudden people are like, oh, can you build a business? You know, and there's just like, there's a lot of extra knowledge that goes into all of that. It's like a completely separate thing that people expect you to be good at and they also expect you to do it on your, like, as a side project. Like, I want to sustain this side project and sustain this open source project, but I also need to now run a business as a side project too.

0:17:58 - (Zach): Like, it just does seem like there's this huge trend right now of just monetizing all of our free time. Like, people are very tempted to.

0:18:08 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:18:09 - (Zach): Just take any hobby or passion that they have and try to monetize it. But I guess I'm maybe a little bit more old school in that, like, if I want to make money, I want to do it at a 9 to 5 job. 9 to 5 job and yeah. Not worry about monetizing everything in my after hours. Yeah. I don't know. I also have a family too, so it's just like I have different, a different perspective than I did 15 or 20 years ago.

0:18:34 - (Matt): Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a lot of, like, I don't know, how would you say it probably sounds cliche, like youthful energy, you know, of folks that are like very kind of forward thinking and they can build a lot. But then, you know, this is making me think of sort of the philosophy with Fawn awesome, which maybe kind of leads into the next question is like there's a possibility for like really amazing invention to come out of that time period of someone's life. Somebody who's really talented and really smart.

0:19:07 - (Matt): But it also, that energy also needs to be tempered by other things in one's life because you can't make your job or whatever it is that you're producing for the world or trying to monetize your entire life. I mean it's just not a sustainable, healthy way to live. And we really, we really try and you know, focus on the value of the things that we bring to work as a whole person that kind of informs and it may not be entirely clear what the through line is, but like there's so many different aspects of life that sort of feed into the energy of what it is that we create, say in our 9 to 5.

0:19:51 - (Matt): And clearly like you're articulating that value too. Which kind of leads it to the next question. We're very much about like sharing our nerd at Font Awesome. And this is here. This is the purpose of the conversation, the nerd show and tell. What kinds of things outside of work are kind of do you get excited about and things that maybe that you work on and geek out about?

0:20:15 - (Zach): Yeah, I think that the lead up to this question is setting me up in a way that my answer is going to be terrible because. And yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know, I think that that's a fair question. But I also just like writing code. I mean I do have a hard time in some ways separating work from not work in that way. But sure, because there is some overlap there. But I will say that one of my favorite things to work on is my personal website and that has almost no business implications to it. But I do just love just treating it as sort of a garden and like tending that garden in a way that there's something almost therapeutic to it.

0:21:07 - (Matt): Sure.

0:21:08 - (Zach): And yeah, I just like building websites, which is maybe like not the best answer in terms of trying to separate work from non work things.

0:21:17 - (Matt): But it seems pretty separate to me. I mean, you know, you're explaining it like a garden that makes total sense. It's like this exists for its own sake and I just enjoy it. I like to walk into the garden and just enjoy being here. There's, there's no. You're not monetizing Anything you're not, you know, it's just for the simple enjoyment of it, you know. Makes sense to me.

0:21:38 - (Zach): I mean there's definitely, there's definitely like a Venn diagram that exists there where I've worked on things on my personal site that then came back to things that I used in a professional setting. Maybe Eleventy is like example of that because my personal website was WordPress and then it was Jekyll and then I rewrote it in Eleventy and I'm sure that affected a lot of the design decisions that went into it. But yeah, I don't know, I think it's just, it's fun to build websites maybe is like a corny thing to say. But yeah, I don't know. I like, I like building websites and I hope that I never lose that sort of joy of, of, of building a little site and putting it online.

0:22:22 - (Matt): Yeah. To start with nothing and say, look, I have created, I've created something, something out of nothing. That's pretty amazing.

0:22:29 - (Zach): Yeah. Yeah, it's a good feeling to build something.

0:22:31 - (Matt): Okay, so lightning round, what's your favorite coding language?

0:22:36 - (Zach): HTML.

0:22:37 - (Matt): HTML.

0:22:37 - (Zach): Okay, easily.

0:22:39 - (Matt): How about a tool that you can't live without?

0:22:42 - (Zach): A tool I can't live without? That's a good question. I would say probably developer tools like browser developer tools like dev tools or Firefox dev tools. I think those are because I am so old that I remember before those existed and I remember the very first dev tools that came out was called Firebug and I remember that feeling of oh, I can see how the browser is rendering this code and see it live and see a live representation of that.

0:23:15 - (Zach): And that was such a game changing thing. And DevTools have just sort of gone nuts since then and have improved like a bunch. But yeah, I remember the feeling of having no insight into what a website was supposed to like, what the live rendered code of a website was supposed to look like. And so yeah, DevTools changed the game and yeah, that's great.

0:23:43 - (Matt): All right, so if you weren't working in web development, what would you be doing instead?

0:23:47 - (Zach): Oof, good question. I appreciate the joy of building things and I maybe would like to make movies. I don't know. I really like movies and storytelling and I think that there is some overlap between building a website and making a little film or something like that. So that's cool. Yeah, I think that would be fun.

0:24:09 - (Matt): Yeah. Tell me about the overlap. What do you mean by that?

0:24:12 - (Zach): I just mean that there is, I mean you both, you end up with an end product. And you can share that end product with people and they can. They can consume it and have a feeling from consuming it. And I think websites are the same way. Yeah, there's definitely. You can get a vibe from a website in the same way that you can get a vibe from watching a movie.

0:24:35 - (Matt): That's true. There are so many different elements involved.

0:24:38 - (Zach): Yeah. And I think that there's a lot of, like, technical decisions that people just completely underestimate in both avenues, too. There's just like a million different rabbit holes you can go down when it comes to the technical aspects of movie making. The same for building websites.

0:24:57 - (Matt): Yep. For sure. Agreed. Right on the nerd show and tell, it's always important that we hear from folks. What is your favorite font, awesome icon or category and why?

0:25:08 - (Zach): Yeah, I was looking through the icons just to, you know, just get a feeling of all the different ones that are out there. And there's just. It's very comprehensive. So many quite. I got to say, the Duotone ones, the new Duotone ones are just like, incredible. And they look great.

0:25:26 - (Matt): They're delightful.

0:25:26 - (Zach): I think the ones that stuck out to me, the toilet paper ones, I love those.

0:25:33 - (Matt): There's like this direction, not this direction.

0:25:35 - (Zach): Toilet paper ones. Yeah, there's over and under. I feel like the. Just like that. Y'all are covering both of those use cases.

0:25:45 - (Matt): It's an important decision.

0:25:46 - (Zach): Some people like it over, some people like it under. The people that get under are clearly wrong.

0:25:50 - (Matt): But clearly. I mean, I'm correcting that around my house all the time and I, you know, I do it quietly, but if I use my daughter's bathroom and I see that under toilet paper, I'm like.

0:26:01 - (Zach): Nope, yeah, that's wrong.

0:26:02 - (Matt): Take the thing off the take. Take it off the roll. Put it back properly. Yep.

0:26:07 - (Zach): It's very important.

0:26:08 - (Matt): It is quite important.

0:26:10 - (Zach): Yeah, we gotta keep that. We gotta get that right. But yeah, the Duotone toilet paper, I think is great.

0:26:16 - (Matt): So good. So what do you envision is next for Eleventy? I imagine you're sort of in discovery process, doing research, and is there anything you can share about what you've been working on?

0:26:27 - (Zach): Yeah, we just shipped the 3.0 release not too long ago, and we've been iterating in the last couple of weeks on some performance things with the 3.0 release. So that's been really good. I've been working on a data export tool, so folks that want to maybe escape from the WordPress ecosystem, we'll have some nicer tools around that and yeah, I mean, I think that there's a whole host of use cases and things that we can tackle moving forward that were not sort of available to us before because we're part of Font awesome now. So, yeah, it's. It's exciting times because we're just going to, I think, tackle some very big things that would not have been possible before. So.

0:27:12 - (Zach): Looking forward to that very much.

0:27:14 - (Matt): Yeah, for sure. So folks that are curious, maybe folks that aren't super familiar with Eleventy, where can they check your stuff out?

0:27:21 - (Zach): Yeah, you can go to the Eleventy website, which is 1:1ty dev. Check it out there. We'll have all the updates there. We got our blog there. Just all the ways that you can keep up to date with Eleventy.

0:27:34 - (Matt): Awesome. Well, I would imagine in the next year or so we'll have. We're going to have more information to share and how Eleventy has joined the awesome universe, and we'll make sure to keep folks abreast of what's next and what they can be checking out. So, Zach, thank you so much for taking a few minutes for the Nerd show and today.

0:27:58 - (Zach): Yeah, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

0:28:00 - (Matt): Yeah, man, for sure. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Nerd show and Tell here at Podcast Awesome. And a huge shout out to Zach Leatherman for sharing his insights, Eleventy's story, and his travels through the wild world of web development. If you're itching to learn more about Eleventy or want to get inspired by some serious web dev talk, you're going to want to check out Eleventy site. And of course, we're going to have more to share in the months to come about how Eleventy fits into the awesome universe. We're really looking forward to that.

0:28:34 - (Matt): As always, this podcast is produced and edited by yours truly, Matt Johnson. The podcast awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin. The musical interstitials were done by Zach Malm, and audio mastering was done by Chris Ends at Lemon Productions.