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Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

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Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#71

Big fan of static site generators and the whole JAMStack idea in general - I use Jekyll extensively - but after building a site with Gatsby, I found it too over-engineered. React is great, and definitely has its place, but to set up React, GraphQL and all the surrounding tooling just to assemble some text files into a template seems like complexity for the sake of it. For me, the fun of static sites - after years of…

Another advantage of developing close to plain HTML is that you’re free from the js next-shiny-thing hamster wheel. For example, I had thought Gatsby was the hip way to create static sites in 2019. Then another comment here mentioned it’s Next.js now.

Gatsby and Next.js are both site frameworks powered by React. They can both be used for static and dynamic sites with different conventions and features around routing, data management, and general app architecture.

Both are "hip" and will likely remain as the top 2 javascript based site frameworks for now, although whether you need either of them is an entirely different question.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#72

Big fan of static site generators and the whole JAMStack idea in general - I use Jekyll extensively - but after building a site with Gatsby, I found it too over-engineered. React is great, and definitely has its place, but to set up React, GraphQL and all the surrounding tooling just to assemble some text files into a template seems like complexity for the sake of it. For me, the fun of static sites - after years of…

Another advantage of developing close to plain HTML is that you’re free from the js next-shiny-thing hamster wheel. For example, I had thought Gatsby was the hip way to create static sites in 2019. Then another comment here mentioned it’s Next.js now.

The difference with Next.js and Gatsby seems to be that Next uses well known React idioms and Gatsby does it's own thing.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#73
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What itch is Gatsby scratching?

I'm one of the use cases that Sam mentions - B2C website. Replatforming our site with Gatsby, Netlify (hosting and more) and Contentful (headless CMS) has saved us hundreds of dollars a month in hosting - our site which receives 20,000 - 30,000 visitors a month now costs $0 to host. Additionally it is radically faster and more secure than it previously was. Being able to use React as needed has enabled us to manage s…

It's tough to take this too seriously since it seems you created this name just to make this comment. What approaches did you try before 'owing your career to gatsby'?

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#74

Question tangential to Gatsby for those of you who use such static site builders as blogs: are there any good tools for writing/composing posts or are you all doing it by hand? I have set up the same blog maybe 3 times and I always stop posting because I need to be in my coding environment to do so (and if I'm there, I might as well be working on code). I'd really like to find something that I could use to make a pos…

That's why I built Jekyll+: https://github.com/Wiredcraft/jekyllplus#readme In a nutshell, it offers a better UI to edit your content on a Jekyll site by talking directly to the Github API.

This looks great, thank you!

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#75
post #65

Gatsby is great; we use it for all our marketing sites because it doesn't hide content behind JavaScript like plain React so it's better for SEO. Gatsby would be great to compete with Netlify for static React app hosting.

Don't search engine crawlers render React properly?

Google kinda sorta sometimes executes JavaScript on pages it crawls, but much less frequently and less reliably than regular HTML indexing.

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#77

Big fan of static site generators and the whole JAMStack idea in general - I use Jekyll extensively - but after building a site with Gatsby, I found it too over-engineered. React is great, and definitely has its place, but to set up React, GraphQL and all the surrounding tooling just to assemble some text files into a template seems like complexity for the sake of it. For me, the fun of static sites - after years of…

I switched my personal Jekyll site to Gatsby 2 years ago. I ran into some minor bugs and even contributed 3 PRs that got merged. I loved working with it for a few weeks. Two months after switching, it too dawned on me how over-engineered it is. I switched off of it to a custom static site generator I made (admittedly it was also over-engineered), but I'm finally back to a simple static generator called zola [1] and it feels so refreshing.

Not only is Gatsby over-engineered, it's also bloated IMO. I think one of their main selling points it that page loads seem instant. Preloading other pages in the background seems needless to me when we're talking about a simple blog. Sure, it might be good for apps, but forcing my (few) visitors to download needless mbs on desktop or mobile seems like a bad user experience to me.

[1]: https://github.com/getzola/zola

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#79
post #13

I wonder who the market for Gatsby is. I considered signing up for them for a somewhat simple markdown-powered blog, but ultimately ended up writing my own solution because I couldn’t justify the cost. The documentation for the self-hosted solution seems designed to put you off doing it yourself.

I'm missing something from the picture I guess, but what service they offer for 50 bucks/month if you could host your static page built with Gatsby literaly anywhere for much less / free?

Re: Gatsby raises $15M Series A for its modern web development platform

#80
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What itch is Gatsby scratching?

I'm one of the use cases that Sam mentions - B2C website. Replatforming our site with Gatsby, Netlify (hosting and more) and Contentful (headless CMS) has saved us hundreds of dollars a month in hosting - our site which receives 20,000 - 30,000 visitors a month now costs $0 to host. Additionally it is radically faster and more secure than it previously was. Being able to use React as needed has enabled us to manage s…

busted!
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