Transitioning from Backend Development to Frontend Publishing: My Journey with a Static Blog Built with 11ty
As a seasoned .NET backend developer, my professional expertise has predominantly revolved around building complex server-side systems, managing data flow, and ensuring robust infrastructure — tasks that often happen behind the scenes and remain invisible to end-users. Venturing into the realm of frontend development and creating a publicly accessible website was an entirely new experience that presented fresh challenges and learning opportunities.
Motivated by the desire to share my insights, showcase reusable libraries I’ve developed, and establish a digital presence, I decided to craft a lightweight, static blog. After researching various options, I settled on 11ty (Eleventy), a modern static site generator known for its speed and simplicity. Its minimal setup and efficient performance made it an ideal choice for my project.
Throughout this journey, I gained valuable insights into frontend workflows, performance optimization, and the nuances of static site generation. Building this blog provided a refreshing departure from my usual backend responsibilities — such as optimizing memory layouts, fine-tuning garbage collection, or diagnosing multithreaded race conditions. Instead, I focused on front-end performance, user experience, and code maintainability.
Introducing ByteAether Blog
I’m pleased to unveil my new personal project: the ByteAether Blog. It serves as a platform for sharing technical thoughts, tutorials, and showcasing reusable code libraries I’ve built over time.
To evaluate its performance, I ran Lighthouse audits, and I am excited to share the benchmarks with the community. I hope you’ll find the content engaging and insightful.
This experience has been both rewarding and educational, illustrating how versatile a developer’s skill set can become when exploring new areas of web development. Whether you’re a backend specialist looking to experiment with frontend tools or simply interested in static site generation, I encourage you to give it a try.
Feel free to check out the blog and share your thoughts or tips for optimizing static sites!
