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About

Bob, circa 2009

Hi! I'm Bob Monsour.

Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-raised, and educated in Florida and Los Angeles, I'm now retired and living in Northern California with my wonderful wife and artist, Sandra, and our Portuguese Water Dog, Soda. Our son is out on his own and lives in Los Angeles.

We travel occasionally and I enjoy reading and trying to stay fit. I'm also having fun being a part of the community of web developers who make and use the static site generator Eleventy. A big part of that is maintaining a website and newsletter called the 11ty Bundle.

I've had the privilege of working in the technology industry, beginning in the late 70s. I was fortunate to work on a lot of interesting projects with some really great people.

For a career view, it's probably best to look at my LinkedIn profile.

Some of the more interesting projects that I've worked on include the Motorola BPR2000 Pager, the Tono-Pen, and Stacker by Stac Electronics, of which I was a co-founder. Following my time at Stac, I joined a spin-off of the company called Hifn. As part of that work, I co-authored two IETF RFCs which brought lossless compression technology to internet payloads, the IP Payload Compression Protocol, and IP Payload Compression Using LZS, Hifn's proprietary compression technology.

Most recently (meaning early 2023), I've fallen head over heels with the static site generator called Eleventy. This website is built with it and I've been following its development and use, reading articles to learn how to use it, and writing my own articles to share what I've learned. I've started creating a series of blog posts that I call The 11ty Bundle created a new website called 11tybundle.dev. The original blog posts have been duplicated there with some new ones added. Each issue The site contains a curated list of Eleventy releases, blog posts, sites, and resources. I collect these from my RSS reader, Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and wherever I can find them. There seems to be no shortage of people writing about how they use various aspects of Eleventy. I'm having fun doing it and learning a lot along the way.

As of now, I'm envisioning creating a dedicated site for this set of resources. UPDATE: vision realized. Ultimately, I'd like to make it possible for members of the Eleventy community to submit their own resources for inclusion in the bundle. I'm not sure how I'll do that yet, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. The community is very active and supportive. I try to pitch in and answer some of the simpler questions on the Eleventy Discord server.

I'm very glad that I've found something technically interesting and useful to sink my teeth into. I'm also glad that I've found a community of people who are willing to share their knowledge and help others. I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds.

Most of the pages on the site are using the Classical Humanist fonts from Modern Font Stacks, a set of system fonts that look similar across browsers and operating systems. This eliminates the need to load a font from an external source.