When I was younger, I wanted to be a "robot scientist". I found them fascinating and wanted to learn about how they work and how to build them, but I lived in the middle of nowhere, in a time when the web was still finding it's feet, which meant that the resources weren't really there for me and eventually I realised that it wasn't really a viable option.
In my early teens, I found web development and I've been hooked ever since. Open source was, and still is, massively helpful for me to learn from. Whether that's taking apart open source projects to learn how they work, or contributing to them.
Recently, I found out that these two worlds collided.
Ever since I gave Eleventy a go when I was building the LeedsJS website, I've been a huge fan and advocate, even convincing some people to give it a try out of my sheer enthusiasm for it. I absolutely love the simplicity and flexibility of it, as well as things like data files. I have a whole post talking about this stuff from when I was building the new LeedsJS website.
I've been meaning to convert my own site over for a while, and recently took the plunge and decided to do it. As well as giving me the opportunity to dig into Eleventy without a deadline pressing me, it also gave me the chance to make some stylistic changes.
A couple of weeks ago an idea popped into my head, I built it in a few hours and today, as it's a bank holiday, I'm launching it into the world!
Some of you will be aware that while I'm not necessarily great at it, I enjoy playing around with hardware. One of the talks that I've been fortunate enough to travel the world to give is about using JavaScript to do bits of home automation, including automating my curtains and making my own thermostat.
So it may come as no real surprise that when I heard there was going to be a Christmas jumper competition at work last year, I decided add LEDs to my jumper and connect it to the Internet.
At the end of 2018, I announced that I was setting a 6 month deadline for LeedsJS to move away from Meetup. At the time they charged $90 for 6 months as an organiser, which I was paying out of my own pocket. At the time of writing, this has been raised to $98.94.
My previous site hadn't been touched since late 2014 and was running using a custom PHP system I'd written that took markdown and produced the page. This was happening every time someone hit the page so was pretty inefficient.
As my focus is no longer on PHP, I wanted to move towards something JavaScript based. I didn't want to use a client side framework to do this, as the content is pretty static and I feel it would be needless to require JavaScript to present static content.