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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

#151

Post by petra »

csande17 wrote: post #81

I don't really like Gatsby's product, but I've got to admit that their business strategy makes a lot of sense. It's a pretty good three-step approach: 1. Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over, both by touting the genuine benefits of static sites (security, scalability, TTFB performance, etc.) and by riding the Cool Kid Front-End Stack hype train. 2. Lock them in with an overly-complicated framework a…

It should be pretty easy to auto-generate static sites from wordpress.

Shifter and HardyPress already do so. That gets you all the advantages of static sites, combined with all the advantages of WordPress(ecosystem, tools, affordable labor, easy to use by clients).

Their only major limitation is that they generate/"compile" the whole site, and this takes time.

But that seems solvable by caching(in most cases) and by scaling(which may be easy with serverless). I think it's just a matter of time.

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

#152

Post by arcturus17 »

arcturus17 wrote: post #123

I’ve been playing with Gatsby on toy projects, and recently I’ve considered using it in prod in an eCommerce site. Then I saw that the content preview feature was $50 / month - and it’s not even integrated yet with my CMS of choice. How can teams accept to let go of such fundamental features? I love the React dev experience as much as the next guy, but I certainly can’t find a way to justify this to my clients...

Apologies for the double comment but another flaw I’ve seen with Gatsby in eCommerce has to do with fetching the product listings...

You basically have two options: (a) fetch them dynamically (b) trigger a rebuild on product update

With (a) you have spinners and potentially worse SEO. With (b) you have to deal with a delay from hitting “Publish” to seeing the changes deployed in prod...

Again, these are all solved problems in just about every other eCommerce framework!

If you look at some of the Gatsby eCommerce prod examples you will see a few gorgeous sites (the Flamingo one for example) but they all have very few product references and features (no user accounts, etc)

All this is to say the possible use cases for Gatsby in eCommerce seem very narrow, though I would love to be proven wrong.

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

#153

Post by tluyben2 »

dunerat wrote: post #125
graphememes wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except a couple hundred lines of code could address the issues that Gatsby addresses. The posters here aren't wrong. It is an overhyped, overbloated, overconfig heavy stack that ultimately renders static html. I have used them, they are exactly as these posters say.

do you have any suggestions for people like myself, who aren't interested in or are not capable of building their own proprietary static site generator? Any tools that meet similar needs to those that gatsby meets that you would recommend and why?

Just out of interest; what are the needs Gatsby needs that you need? Static site generation can be done with WP plugins, I guess most other CMS's also have plugins for it and there are many (way too many) open source static site generators. So you are not just talking about that; what needs does it fulfill for your case that you want to use Gatsby for. I am asking as I have read the comments and the homepage and to me it looks to fulfill a strange niche: to make a static content site 'with the latest tech' and you have to be a programmer to do it. Feels to me like the worst of all those worlds besides not having to deploy anything, but that's also normal these days (wordpress.com, wix etc). What is the business case for my company to prefer this?

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

#155

Post by ajdegol »

calcsam wrote: post #28

Gatsby co-founder here. We're super excited for this so we can make Gatsby even more awesome. Happy to answer any Qs!

Your pricing model doesn't offer any benefit for paying annually; in fact, given the time value of money, it is a disincentive. Being paid up front means you can deploy that cash to grow.

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

#156

Post by BigJono »

chrisweekly wrote: post #104
[deleted] wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I take issue with your tone and cynicism, and disagree w/ your premise. Your sarcasm and condescension aren't helpful. And there's no way your "couple hundred lines of code" addressed more than a fraction of the real-world use cases addressed by Gatsby. You cast aspersions on a huge swath of your peers who work with the best tools at hand to solve difficult problems... it's not just arrogant, it's ignorant. IME it's…

The whole reason to replace a library with your own code is that that couple hundred lines only has to support the subset of features you need from something like Gatsby.

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

#157

Post by danpalmer »

azangru wrote: post #147
tyingq wrote: post #93

A static page framework that shoves content into a client side graphql store and then extracts bits out to render a page? It's popular, so I can't say it was a bad idea. I guess I'll just say I must be old because it sounds like satire.

Let me offer a real-world example. We were once tasked to build a website for a small publishing house. The site would have pages of books and of authors. Each book page would link to the page(s) of the book's author(s). Each author's page would have thumbnail(s) of this author's book(s). There was also to be an index page, which would contain various books, with names of respective authors, and links to each book's…

I've had a lot of good experiences with Jekyll, and I'm fairly sure that the problem you've described would have worked nicely with it. Extending it is also really straightforward, you just put a few lines of Ruby in a file in the right place.

I've moved my site from Jekyll to Gatsby, and while there are some nice things, it's not been a clear win. My site is very significantly slower for first load, but slightly faster for all subsequent loads. The build is far less stable with Gatsby, there are ~5 dependency updates per day, things like Sass don't "just work" anymore, but on the other hand, there are a few more packages that do useful things that I didn't get in the Jekyll community.

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

#158

Post by bartq »

I don't really know what Gatsby is good at because I've never been target customer of it. But judging on website and docs I think its power lies in simplicity: people want to get shit together and call a day. This tool allows that. It probably won't live long, but that's not a problem, right? Most websites built with it are short lived: promotion www, sales, register forms etc.

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

#159

Post by michaelbrooks »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #149
gexla wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Convince the WordPress/enterprise crowd to switch over The Gatsby homepage mentions Wordpress as a possible data source. I don't evens see mention of their CMS on the front page. The only "service" I see them advertising there is Preview - which seems to be a development collaboration tool. I don't think they're convincing people to move away from Wordpress. It's funny that the article talks about moving away from…

Yeah this isn't a Wordpress replacement; it's a framework for creating websites and / or hybrid websites, the way I see it. In that regard it competes with Next, Nest and Nuxt (I don't even know the last two, I lifted that from https://slides.com/seldo/jsconf-eu-2019#/60 ; are those all based on / similar to Next? They should fix their naming)

I believe Nuxt is the VueJS serverside framework version of Next. I've never heard of Nest before, that looks fairly new compared to Next/Nuxt.

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

#160

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

kilburn wrote: post #69
mattkevan wrote: post #50

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…

TLDR: I just completed a large project built with Gatsby, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The technology is extremely complicated, and the end result quite inflexible. Here's an idea of how the whole thing works when you have non-technical users: 1. You need some sort of Content Management System for non-technical users to be able to create content. 2. That CMS stores the content however it sees fit (db/files/wh…

"now Gatsby inlines ALL of the site's css in each and every page" Did this abruptly happen at some point? I've had attempts to migrate components from old repositories cause similar issues and all I could see is that something with the dependencies of that project (e.g. "tree-model" definitely seemed to cause issues) were forcing gatsby to be overly safe in terms of culling CSS.

Similarly we had issues with imports a component library, but upon inspecting other projects the same issue was happen with client side rendered apps, so it was down to how we built the library rather than Gatsby.

My experiences were pretty positive but I did encounter every issue you've listed and would probably try next.js next time just to know what I've been missing. Have you worked with it before doing similar stuff?

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As far as Gatsby goes I think it occupies a definite niche but one that needs to communicated very effectively. You get: - static web pages - react ecosystem (very useful if all other company frontends are on react and there's a design system) - some webapp functionality

The last one being key, more than _some_ and it's probably going to start becoming a headache juggling all the pieces.

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