The thing is, 11ty — the open source framework — *is* tested and proven, under its original name, without the specter of a Pro licensing split or questions about 'sustainability'. The Kickstarter may have done much more to undermine 11ty as a platform than to help it relaunch as a freemium product.
I shared the campaign link in an agency community Slack to find out what less web-nerdy owners thought of it, and generally the fact it was a Kickstarter was a huge turn-off, because it underlined that this platform/solution wasn't tested or proven yet, and didn't offer anything new except vibes.
There's a really crowded market for both web frameworks and build/hosting tools. The original BA Pro announcement spoke of SEO tools, visual editing, collaboration, etc etc — these aren't new. Other vendors offer some or all of these, including ones that work with 11ty. What else does this offer?
If this is just a pre-marketing campaign for something Jory, Zach, and co. are doing anyway, then the number isn't real, but clearly the marketing moment they were trying to engineer didn't work.
If the fundraising is necessary for 11ty to become Build Awesome and be 'sustainable', then what?
The original campaign met it's stated funding goal of $30K within about a day, BUT failed to grow past that at a fast enough clip and is therefore in need of a do-over.
So… is the actual target for the campaign not $30K? Is it $100K? $250K? Is the number even real?
A creator doesn't need to have figured everything out to ask the community to help crowdfund a project, of course. A number of folks would back a 11ty 4.0 campaign just for some swag and a special Discord channel.
But what happens if the campaign fails? Does that mean 11ty/Build Awesome is dead?
Obviously, Font Awesome is a company, Zach works there, he needs a salary, there are stuff they can do with a revenue stream that benefits 11ty / Build Awesome and ensures its future. But the benefits of the future platform (and therefore the rewards for backers) aren't clearly defined yet.
Some questions I have, though, having looked at the Kickstarter (and gotten all the emails), and moreover, having worked on web frameworks and tools for a bit, that at least point at *my* muted reaction to the campaign:
What _is_ Build Awesome Pro, and why does it need financial support?
In his post, Jory pins the Build Awesome campaign's underperformance on an email delivery issue (with context linked there if you're curious). I have no reason to doubt that diagnosis, and certainly I believe that *they* believe that's why it failed.
First, sustainably funding open-source tools and platforms in a forthright, honest, non-creepy way is *really hard* and the *Awesome crew deserves praise for even attempting it. Underneath the Kickstarters and (sorry) cringey videos are three excellent projects that devs rely upon every single day.
Earlier this week, the @fontawesome.com team launched a Kickstarter for their third Awesome-branded product, Build Awesome.
Today, @shkspr.bsky.social announced they've paused (or ended?) the campaign after just a few days. blog.fontawesome.com/pausing-kick...
A few thoughts on this: 🧵
are hush puppies nuggets
ICE under Trump 2.0 built an unprecedented media operation - deploying videographers to raids, pumping out edgy social posts, swiping pop music for hype videos - and the main metric for evaluating its impact shows that Americans now hate ICE more than ever
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...
I’m still confused by why Dem leadership hates politics so much that they refuse to politicize anything, and instead just expect to win without fighting because… why?
Polymarkets seem bad but also the ultimate version of rampant encouragement to arbitrage everything. Find something neat on someone's stoop or at a thrift store? You should resell it online for more! Score tickets to a hot show? Resell them online! Figured out how to do something? Sell a course!
I’ve been experimenting with using a Framework laptop and Arch Linux for a couple of months now, and I like it, but I have to worry about battery, heat, fan noise, missing apps, broken software, and a host of other things that just don’t happen on the Mac.
No Liquid Glass, tho. That part’s nice.
A lot of people are truly and honestly jazzed about AI empowering them to create things they used to need specialized knowledge or experience to have done before. But there aren’t many examples where AI helped get something done that was important enough to have been done without AI.
My go-to story about the “impact” of AI is a lady explaining ChatGPT to her dad by saying “it wrote a poem about a puppy in a library in like 3 seconds that would have taken me hours.”
Does she usually write poems about puppies in libraries? Is it productivity if the work was totally extra?
Today in "thanks for calling that out": I was trying to get tech support for a brand-new $350 keyboard, of course I was routed to a chatbot, and of course it suggested a software plugin that doesn't exist.
Hi friends I just got laid off along with 40% of Block. No idea what comes next, but if you have need for a Principal Frontend Engineer hit me up!
I've never seen the original video for Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" and it's very goofy and cute www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6FB...
I do not give any more craps, fucks, or shits about personnel changes at giant corporations.
Apple has a new design lead? Xbox has a new CEO? Disney’s parks guy will be their next CEO?
🤷 🥱 🙄
And what about the energy I have to spend every time I ask an LLM a question about something that happened in the last six months — since the knowledge window cutoff — instructing it to search the web instead of just telling me my thing doesn’t exist? bsky.app/profile/x2y....
School lunchroom rectangle pizza with tiny cubes of pepperoni.
The Xennial urge to Disappear Completely
Forking a web component library on the weekend for fun
Big data is like the fun house mirrors that show your whole body but make one part look huge and distorted. You can often tell who’s using a lot of data in product development because they roll out a lot of changes that seem incoherent, like no human being ever saw them all together and said 👍
The 42 shades of blue anecdote at Google was about trying to optimize for a KPI, but it was an exception that proves the rule. Most design decisions at Google are not tested that rigorously. And in the few projects that do run on experiments, politics and bureaucracy tend to speak louder than data.
Meta and Netflix, OTOH, live and die by numbers. “Data driven” companies use data as a *replacement* for human taste or judgment, by reducing the whole world to metrics, then working to juke the stats. PMs there would never get blindsided by a sudden fall in a KPI they spend their lives optimizing.
