Where are the Jekyll jobs? I Love Jekyll!

I’ve only been a web developer for a couple years now and have had experiences with various frame works for instance word press, drupal, rails, and of course Jekyll.
Jekyll by far is my favorite!
My question is why are there no jobs for Jekyll? I feel like I can’t be the only one who loves Jekyll and would want to make coding Jekyll sites a full time job. I dream about Jekyll when I am coding php for Drupal and word press sites. I think about how easy it would be on Jekyll to do this complicated logic.
Maybe I am not looking in the right place for the Jekyll jobs?

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I wouldn’t expect people to know they need a jekyll person - they need a drupal person or a wordpress person cause that is what their previous person gave them, and it is pretty obvious. Maybe if their current site was built with jekyll they just have the static site and don’t even know it was created with jekyll.

A few months ago I looked for jobs with jekyll as a keyword on Upwork.com and was really surprised how many there were - I didn’t expect to see any and there were several, and there were several freelancers with Jekyll as a specialty.

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I am a new developer and I am currently using Upwork.com and other freelancing opportunities to gain experience working on live projects. At this point, most of the jobs I take are static sites and I use Jekyll to develop them and simply hand over the finished product with a lot of failed attempts to spark up a conversation about Jekyll.

Something I have noticed about Jekyll jobs posted on Upwork.com is that most of them are posted by other developers from a different field rather than web development. This has presented a great opportunity for me because as the new kid on the block, I am able to work with other developers and help them solve problems.

A few helpful ideas to find Jekyll work, look for developers outside of web development and set them up with a better blogging experience. Converting templates over to Jekyll presents a lot of opportunity and one of my favorites is helping other developers with Jekyll deployment methods.

I am grateful for the opportunities Jekyll has presented to me and I hope these few tips help you find the same experiences I have had!

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Really great conversation here. I think of all the job postings I’ve ever seen out there for a developer I only ran across one where it asked specifically for a person who was familiar with Jekyll. And I’m guessing this is one out of hundreds of jobs.

As others have pointed out, Jekyll or static site generation for that matter is more of a tool known to developers. Which is why services around Jekyll or static are targeted to the developer market instead of the consumer market.

The problem that I’ve seen is this though and which is why you all love Jekyll but do not love Wordpress and Drupal. Because from a developer stand point it makes it pretty easy to hack a Jekyll template with Liquid instead of getting into the nity gritty of a PHP stack. But from a consumer stand point, if you ask yourself who are the main creators of the content generated on a website, it is non-technical folks.

Those are the real end-users of a CMS and they need an interface to makes their lives easier to simply publish and get information out into the world. I think the better approach to having a marriage of Jekyll within a job place is understanding a companies’ needs and seeing if Jekyll can provide a solution.

Advantages being things like static files so you can put it up on a CDN quickly and have it distribute quickly. Or low technical debt, since you’re not dealing with a complex stack, with many plugins to get something working the way you want it, it is easier to maintain.

Then you can suggest Jekyll and marry it with service like Forestry.io by @Scott-Forestry.io and his team. Where as a developer you can be happy with your Jekyll projects while the end-user the content creators have a CMS-esque interface to publish without knowing how to make git commits or run builds for Jekyll.

Another way to look at it is that might be more applicable to jobs that are similar to Jekyll is looking into Shopify run companies. Small business on Shopify might want to tap into a developer that has the know how to use Liquid, which is the same templating tech for Jekyll. If you’re pretty good with templating with Liquid, I’m pretty sure with a little knowledge you could pick up Shopify dev.

So another approach to the why aren’t there Jekyll jobs, is get a job that is hiring for things like front-end development and then create the “Jekyll” job by introducing Jekyll to the toolbelt of tech used to build based on a company’s needs.

Hope this helps. Cheers.

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I’ve been hired specifically because of an expertise in Jekyll before, so it’s definitely a thing.

I’m working on a job board for Jekyll (and any other static site generator) on our site devoted to same: https://www.thenewdynamic.org/

Should have an initial version up within the next two weeks. let me know if you’re interested. It will be completely free, because my hope is to broaden the universe of people using Jekyll and other tools.

Bud

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That sounds great! I definitely look forward to seeing that.

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such a great resource . ThX for

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I think what is needed is a way so people can blog on a jekyll site without knowing anything about it.

Someone who knows how to do this should create a posthook that works on shared hosting and lets people write an email to their blog and it becomes a blog post. It should be an email template that knows how to deal with any image attachments and that checks spelling and grammar nicely - first image becomes the feature image and any following images insert into the post.

There would still be the problem that the blogger can’t ‘edit’ a blogpost easily or switch/delete images but the system would be very convenient.

Maybe there could be a way to send a kill email for deleting a former blogpost so that folks could at least send an updated post if they messed up …

Similar to Forestry, Netlify CMS is a feature on Netlify where you can edit content on Jekyll or similar Jamstack markdown sites and you can let up to 100 users I think sign themselves up for free. Then they can edit and create posts. But their is no user scoping of access, so they could edit or destroy other’s posts :frowning:

Forestry or Netlify CMS also works well for a trusted group of a few invited admin users who you trust not to mess with each others content maliciously.

Regarding Jekyll career prospects…

There seems like a trend towards less WordPress, Python, etc. approaches of database and server and more prerendered / static content. That is part of the Jamstack movement. There are conferences and talks around this, on how the site scaled and performed better by switching to Jamstack (or maybe I am a sucker for PR).

Netlify is all about Jamstack.

JAMStack is about git based content. J is for JavaScript - hence Nuxt and Gatsby and VuePress etc. which are built on React or Vue.

A for API

And M for markdown.

You don’t have to use J and A.
So Jekyll is a tool within the Jamstack area.

Forestry has some nice templates to set up a site from scratch that uses Jekyll, Gatsby, or Hugo…

I’m working withe the CloudCannon team, because of that …as long as they provide a robust Editor’s oriented ‘backend’ … . The claim to be (focused on) "the Jekyll CMS ". As long as i can see (i jumped in reciently , 2 months ago… and still have to dig in ) I’m quite satisfied with their service.
( they just reciently launched Hugo support , BTW )