In an effort to economize on holiday gifts last winter, I started crocheting again. I learned to crochet as a teenager from my grandmother and so have practiced on an off for over 2 decades now (yikes). I had lots of spare yarn and figured I remebered enough to pick it back up and make some cute doo-dads for gifts, but color me surprised when, after years of not crocheting, I discovered new-found patience and skill in the craft.

I figure 3+ years as a mom and 10+ years as a developer has honed some of my patience and technical/spatial abilities. What a surprise side-benefit!

Anyway, crocheting has become a hobby I can pick up and put down for the brief periods of time I have throughout the day in a way that I always struggled with while programming. Last year’s “2024: The Year of the Mom Programmer” was kind of a bust, and I got really tired of hearing myself say the same things over and over; namely “gee, I wish I had more time to program but really I just don’t.” Crocheting has scratched that itch of productivity and mental challenge that I’d been struggling to consistently get.

But what does this have to do with Eleventy?⌗

Not unlike plenty of moms out there, it occurred to me that if I was having fun crocheting and if I wasn’t aiming to turn this into a full-time job, there could be a little money to be made out there on the internets. And if I didn’t plan to go whole-hog on turning this into a small business, all I really needed was a simple website to showcase my work. No Etsy, no Shopify - just a portfolio of sorts with the option to purchase.

Keeping this slim, I didn’t want to pay a monthly fee to Wix, Squarespace, or another website builder; I drastically preferred doing the legwork myself. To move fast, I figured a static site generator would be an easy way to add products and not have to deal with external data retrieval, and while this blog uses Hugo I never got around to working in Go, so I thought something more Javascript-focused (my specialty, at least at one point in my life) made more sense.

Cut to - Eleventy!

So now I have a second website - plus a blog (crochet-centered, of course), running a statically generated site. I am using some of the things I learned from last year when it comes to programming, particularly being super-focused on the minimum requirements to make the thing “do the thing”. What you’ll see here is…well, that minimum!

The site currently uses Eleventy and Tailwind, and I’m again using Firebase to host. I took the time to set up some CI/CD with GitHub Actions too, which I’ve found really helpful for making fast changes. I don’t actually have any tools for automated sales on the site, but this isn’t high on my priority list (does that technically make this not an e-commerce site, but rather just a portfolio? 🤔 WHO CARES).

The next obvious step to me is adding more images. Currently each product gets 1 photo apiece, and so I’ll add some image optimization and the ability to reize and have a photo selector of sorts. Should be a fun challenge, fingers-crossed!

But wait, if you didn’t have time for 1 website last year, how will you have time for 2?⌗

That’s a great question, and I have no idea. But at least I’ll be having fun and exercising my mind in ways that the kiddos just can’t (yet, anyway)!