vannsl.io | Blog

Between Diapers and Development – How My Blog Came to Life with Eleventy

Foreword

I worked continuously as a software developer for 13 years and 3 months. No gaps, not even a month-long break. And then? Suddenly, maternity leave and parental leave were upon me. Well, after an entire pregnancy, it wasn't that sudden. But I still wasn’t prepared for months of "not working." And yes, every parent is probably laughing out loud at the phrase "parental leave" and "not working." Before, I thought a 40-hour job was full-time. Oh, how naïve.

Time during parental leave is limited, and life is completely dictated by the baby. When you eat, sleep, or shower—all of it revolves around the baby. And then, suddenly, there are unexpected windows of time when the baby sleeps longer than expected or someone else takes over. And you find yourself standing there, thinking: "Now what?" Housework? Meh. Starting an 800-page fantasy epic? Too much commitment.

What I missed the most? Gaming and working. So, I started again. Just 7.5 weeks after giving birth, I ended my break from the Working Draft podcast early and returned while the baby was with its dad. Still, I had plenty of time when the baby napped in the carrier during the day. Because during the day, sleeping only happens when tightly strapped to me in a carrier—preferably while I'm bouncing on a gym ball.

So, I divided my time 50/50 between game consoles and my laptop. Always with headphones, of course. But what was I actually doing on the laptop? I had always wanted to set up a tech blog! The real question was: why had I never managed to do it before giving birth?

The "Right" Tool

The frontend ecosystem offers countless frameworks for blogs. I wanted to take my time, test different tools, weigh the pros and cons, and make the best choice. On my mental shortlist were:

VitePress and Nuxt Content because I usually work with Vue. Solid, Astro, and Qwik because I heard a lot about them at conferences. But are those the right criteria? Well, it depends. For companies, it might be relevant how many developers are interested in a framework—to ensure they can find enough skilled people for projects.

However, as we discussed in Revision 656 (link to come once the episode is released) of Working Draft, we believe developers should be able to work with any framework. Besides, I'd be working on this project alone.

To maximize learning, I could choose something new. Normally, I consider that a valid reason. But given my limited time, that wasn't a priority for me. Another criterion could be long-term viability: Is there a large core team and an active community? Well, who still remembers AngularJS? From Google? And didn’t Facebook/Meta start Jest? I wouldn’t rely too much on that.

I built my portfolio website vannsl.io with Sapper years ago—the predecessor of the SvelteKit framework. But guess what? It’s still running on Sapper. I never rewrote it because I had no real reason to.

So, my decisive criterion was simple: My baby is sleeping now—so I need to move fast. No long learning curves, no complex setup.

As Tobias Struckmeier aptly put it:

"Imho usually the software chosen doesn't matter a lot to my experience. It's the dedication and love put in and in case of a blog anyway the content that makes the gold."

So, I abandoned the idea of a grand evaluation. I needed a domain and hosting, but everything had to be as quick and pragmatic as possible.

Domain and Hosting

In Revision 648: Personal Web Sites, Matthias Ott discussed personal websites and the Indie Web concept with my Working Draft co-hosts Schepp and Peter. The idea? Host your own content instead of relying on platforms like Medium or dev.to. Sounded great—but self-hosting? I simply didn’t have the time.

Buying a new domain? I had vanessaotto.de with Strato, but only for email. My other domains were with Hover. I noticed vanessaotto.com was still available on Strato. Tempting. But the thought of transferring domains or changing plans? No way.

Pragmatism won: The blog now runs on blog.vannsl.io, a subdomain of my already Netlify-hosted portfolio site. Setup time thanks to Netlify DNS? Less than five minutes.

The Tool Decision

My main requirements:

  1. Manage blog posts as Markdown files.
  2. Work on it anytime without a steep learning curve.

I first tried VitePress, thinking it would be easy for me. I followed the Getting Started Guide. But even during setup, I realized: I'd need time to explore themes, actions, and features. I’d need at least an afternoon with full focus. The baby was already stirring in the carrier—so no time for that.

Then I remembered Eleventy. I had heard about it from people who don’t typically follow framework hypes. For example, Stefan Baumgartner’s blog and the Working Draft website both use it. That idea appealed to me. Perfect.

A YouTube tutorial showed me: I only need HTML, JSON, and Markdown. Eleventy automatically generates the routes. Exactly what I was looking for. And Schepp told me that I could even integrate Vue later.

I browsed 11tybundle.dev for inspiration and quickly found a starter template I liked.

I heard rumors about the 100% Lighthouse Score of websites written with Eleventy before. I do not want to talk about Google Lighthouse scores in this article and swallow all my opinions, knowledge and thoughts about this topic now. So, a 100% score should be the default for such a simple website loading basically only HTML and CSS, and maybe a font and one or two lazy loaded images. However, it's still nice to see the confetti after running Google Lighthouse:

100% Lighthouse Score in all categories

The Trade-offs

Normally, I would have:

Instead, I:

And now? Now, I write. Between diaper changes and code. Thanks to Stefan Temme for inspiring this article's title.

  1. You can find these and other useful websites on Tiny Helpers from Stefan Judis. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎