Learn Eleventy From Scratch launch day

Published on by Andy Bell

Today is a massive day for Piccalilli, so here’s a reflective post about the production of the debut course.

Today is a very special day on this website, because the debut course, Learn Eleventy From Scratch, is now live!

The response from the mind-blowing amount of people that have bought it has been overwhelmingly positive, so thank you so much for that. You’ve made me very happy!

Quality of content and most importantly, the accessibility and inclusivity of content, is of the upmost importance to me, so feedback about how this course has helped people to finally understand static site generators and Eleventy really does mean the world to me. It makes me feel like I did my job right. I’m especially happy that people have liked the conversational tone to the content, too.

Fun facts about the production of this Eleventy course

A lot of work has gone into this course—not just with the content, but also infrastructure, so let’s break it down:

  1. The course has a word count of just over 35,000 words! I committed the first draft of the first lesson on the 19th of May. I committed the last bit of content yesterday (living fast and loose).
  2. The production of the course properly started in March this year with some rough prototyping and lesson outlining. I decided the site design context in April which resulted in this thread, which acted as a bit of a production journal.
  3. In total, the main production of the course material resulted in 248 git commits! Combined with the API and content delivery system, it was well over 500 commits by the time I published it all.
  4. A complete, authenticated content delivery system that delivers premium content via an API and service workers has been produced, from scratch, to serve this course to you. There will be some material written about that in the future, for sure, because I’d love to empower others to self-publish.
  5. I produced the song that is the backing track for the trailer video 13 years ago when I used to make music. You can listen to the whole song here.
  6. I say “add the following” 131 times throughout the course, because I am a predictable creature of habit.
  7. Every lesson ends with a now traditional “Wrapping up” section because otherwise, I legitimately won’t sleep.
  8. I’ve said “thanks, pal” to Amy, the editor of the course, about 20 million times.
  9. Last, and most importantly, the entire course and site is built with Eleventy

Wrapping up

The production of this course has been so hard (especially during a pandemic) and so much work, but it has been satisfying work. I love teaching and producing courses will increasingly consume more of my time, rather than client work, which will be ace.

I’m so happy that so many of you have bought this course. It has blown my mind. From the bottom of my heart: thank you so much for your ongoing support! All of the exhaustion is really worth it when you all support the work I do.

For me now, I am having some much needed downtime. Then, I’ve got plenty of new content to produce. There’s all the CUBE CSS stuff, which will include a workshop and further documentation, then of course, I will get started on Learn CSS From Scratch, later in the summer.

Until then, take it easy!

Buy the course now