What's with the name?

Wyam is a Native American name for the Celilo Falls area and is also roughly translated as "echo of falling water" or "sound of water upon the rocks". Which sounds kind of like static. For a static site generator. Get it? I also liked the image of water going over the falls as one thing then going through a transition as it emerged at the bottom as something else. Plus the name just sounds cool, and the domain was available. It's also very searchable (looking at you Visual Studio Code).

Not another static site generator; what were you thinking!?

Here's the thing: I like static site generators. I've been thinking about this problem for a long time (as in, many years). And while there are a lot of generators out there, none of them really fit with the way I think about the problem. I don't want to follow a prescribed notion of what sort of content I'm creating or follow assumptions about the location of files. I wanted a static content generator that is designed from the ground up to be flexible, even if it means making it slightly more complicated to configure. There are some generators that come close (I'm personally fond of the concepts in Metalsmith). I'm also a .NET developer and while there are a couple good static site generators in the .NET ecosystem (Pretzel and Sandra.Snow come to mind), I certainly don't think we've hit peak generator in that world as we have in, say, JavaScript.

TL; DR: I wanted to build one, so I did.