It was about two weeks ago. I was reading (at the time) the latest Tedium article about migrating from WordPress:
In the alternatives section, the last of the five, Eleventy, intrigued me. I've never built a website myself (as in with HTML and stuff), sans a one-off private thing a few years ago, but I thought it would be cool to do everything myself. I could get a site to show off random crap in, and I already have a Codeberg account, so I could just use Codeberg Pages, which is free/libre *and* gratis.
About a week later (don't remember exactly when), I took the plunge and started setting up Eleventy. Following the suggestion of someone else, I decided to follow flaMEd fury's tutorial to create it. It was fairly simple; I just copy-pasted most of the code from the tutorial while figuring some of the other things out. As an example, it took *way* too long to figure out how to reverse a collection so I can display posts by newest-first; turns out I was using the wrong syntax.
"An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch"
The site looks fairly decent. I'll probably use this for showing off cool projects I've done (and will do), like programs and some real life stuff I'm working on. However, as of right now this site is still a work-in-progress, so expect some small to medium-sized changes to this site in the near future.