JAMstacks - Gatsby & 11ty

Recently I've converted my blog to Gatsby. In the process, my friends told me to check out 11ty as well. So to learn 11ty I decided to convert my mom's business website.

The projects were quite different, so it is hard to compare apples to apples. For one, I did a lot of migration of blog posts in Gatsby. I wrote a few custom scripts to help with this. I started with another blog platform and molded my layout to match the blog I cloned. After trying to move it to an 11ty blog, it didn't work as well because of the convention I used for the Gatsby blog. Had I started with 11ty then I don't think it would have been difficult, I would have just used different conventions.

Gatsby seems more mature with lots of 3rd party plugins. I really like their image transformer. It is silly but that was the main selling point for me to try it out.

Other than that, I think any further websites I create using the JAMstack will be done in 11ty. Here are some high-level reasons I preferred 11ty.

• I hate JSX. I'm not saying it is bad or wrong, I just hate working with it. It feels unnatural to me. There is some context-switching involved between working with JSX and HTML.
• I love Nunjucks (notice the j in there - I overlooked that at first). A week ago I never thought I'd say that. But then I read somewhere that James Long, the creator of Prettier was the same person who created Nunjucks. It was said that he designed it after Jinja2. From what I understand, Jinja2 was modeled after Django templating. Having spent years using Django, all of a sudden it all made complete sense and I felt right at home using Nunjucks.
• It was so easy mixing and matching HTML, Nunjucks, and Markdown. 11ty supports each of these and more and it was so simple throwing each of them in as desired.
• I think is really cool that Gatsby generates a GraphQL API for you. I'm guessing you can do some powerful things with it. But, for what I was doing, it felt like overkill. 11ty's collection system seems simple and sufficient for most use cases.
• Build times were much faster on my 11ty project. Yeah, my project was smaller, but I think the simplicity of the design lends itself to faster builds and deploys.

What I didn't like about 11ty:

• The author seems to be a social warrior and so the header of the website is all about his favorite causes. I like the framework, but not all the liberal agendas being supported by the framework.