Tech choices for personal websites can feel very personal. For much of the 2010s, Jekyll was what I was using. It had come out of GitHub, and GitHub was cool so Jekyll was cool. Then at some point, Eleventy came along. Netlify were spending a lot of money to make “Jamstack” happen, and Jamstack was cool so Eleventy was cool.
Being as much a slave to trends as anyone else in tech, I rode that hype train from Jekyll to Eleventy. And times were good. You got all the vibrance and bustle of the npm ecosystem with its tailwinds and its rehypes, and you never had to gaze in terror upon the dreaded words “Installing nokogiri with native extensions” again.
Then Eleventy got acquired. And fair enough, I guess. People gotta eat. And they’re renaming it Build Awesome. Bit of a jarring shift in tone there if you ask me. Very loud and American all of a sudden.
Like I said, tech choices for personal websites can feel very personal. And whoever this new thing is for, it doesn’t feel like it’s for me . So I looked around and figured out that a few other people felt the same, and that the next stop for the hype train appears to be Astro. But Astro’s just been acquired by Cloudflare and has the kind of landing page that feels like it’s only missing a “Contact Sales” button. So maybe not.
I came to the conclusion that it was worth reevaluating Jekyll, and I was pleasantly surprised. Its website hasn’t changed in ten years and neither has anything about how it works. Porting the site back was painless, and to my amazement, sped up my builds significantly. In the whole of 2026 so far, Jekyll has had 12 commits. Because Jekyll is finished. It’s complete. It’s done. And perhaps most importantly in a world that’s become too exciting for its own good, Jekyll is boring. Ten years from now it will probably still exist, still be called Jekyll, and still work the same as it did in 2016.
So hurray for boring things! And good luck to the Font Awesome team with Build Awesome Pro while we’re at it. Here’s hoping it’s a huge hit despite my own lack of interest, and everyone involved becomes unimaginably wealthy after it inevitably gets acquired by Automattic or something!