This mirrors my experience as well. Extremely slow build times, a lot of complexity that is hidden at first but is going to rear its head sooner or later, and GraphQL everywhere for very unclear reasons. Also, surprisingly easy to misconfigure something and get very poor TTI and other Lighthouse scores.
An Honest Review of Gatsby
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Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#42Surprised they didn’t try Eleventy. I was just reading how a Mozilla team converted their extension documentation to it from Jekyll because it has support for Jekyll’s template language via a plugin. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/10/to-eleventy-and-beyond/
Compared to 11ty, I would call Gatsby a bloated framework and that's how the developers also describe it "much more than just a SSG". Gatsby is a hidden minefield though, maybe my use cases weren't aligned but I didn't get why it's got so much hype for trying to find the problems that it would become a solution to.
Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#43I think alot of folks share this view. When we switched our marketing site over to Gatsby it was a godsend, but once we hit over 400 static pages on our site, the build times were killing us. Our devs complained that even on local, building took forever, and because it had to refetch all of our WordPress CMS media library each time, sometimes it would just crash during build. Also we grew the need for good SEO suppor…
"building took forever" -> That's how they make money (which is fine). https://www.gatsbyjs.com/cloud/
Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never tried Gatsby, but I tried Hugo. I like Go, so I searched for a Hugo-template I liked and build some documentation for my project. Then I took a break from the project and when I wanted to update the documentation a few months later (minor changes), I spend about 2 days just bringing my content in sync with the updated template. What a horrible experience. Maybe I was doing something wrong or the template auth…
What was the actual issue it did not compile and what was resolve?
If I remember correctly, Hugo wasn't able to process the template-content combination when I tried starting it after a few months of not using it (Hugo had been updated meanwhile). So I updated the template which didn't solve the issue. Then I tried to find out what changed and it wasn't just a few lines of code, but more fundamental things.
In the end, I just took a completely fresh version of the template and rebuild the documentation by copy and pasting the relevant parts.
For context: Initially I build the documentation in November 2018 and the update happened in April 2020.
Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#45I wonder why it seems nobody wants to use Hugo. Smashing Magazine appears to be happy with it and they tooted about their experience with Hugo multiple times. Instead, everyone chooses Gatsby, Next or another javascript based framework of this week.
I've tried to use Hugo multiple times and absolutely hated it.
It's in a very weird spot in terms of difficulty/productivity.
It's got a very steep learning curve, with a lot of complexity. Things like how it resolves certain values involve following multiple steps that may or many exist in your project and require knowing framework specific rules and terminology. Stuff like which template is used is so complicated. All the other stuff about taxonomy and archetypes, etc also get really confusing.
But all that complexity translated to very little productivity (for me at least). I struggled with setting up beautiful templates, and found all the extra configuration cumbersome because the simple things I wanted to do was buried under all this other crap I had to learn about.
And when I did need advanced features, I didn't want to use hugo. Or things that I did need, were core aspects that were difficult to do with hugo because it's core configuration is so bloated.
Not to mention all the problems with versions and documentation that I had when one at least one of the occasions I tried it.
Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#46I wonder... If Jekyll worked better, wouldn't have been better to just invest some time in learning enough ruby to make jekyll fit their needs?
Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#47Elder.js for Svelte looks like a great "pure SSG" alternative for larger SEO sites:
Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#48Using gatsby is the worst choice I ever made, the build times are infuriatingly slow and GraphQL really is not a good fit for it.
The amount of time that you have to spend just fiddling with Gatsby is insane and then in the end it only barely works.
Their marketing keeps touting fast but I doubt there is something slower when you actually use it for something of consequence.
Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#49"Modern" is a term that should be reserved for improvement and progress. Are Gatsby users experiencing net gains from the alleged modern tooling?
Re: An Honest Review of Gatsby
#50I think alot of folks share this view. When we switched our marketing site over to Gatsby it was a godsend, but once we hit over 400 static pages on our site, the build times were killing us. Our devs complained that even on local, building took forever, and because it had to refetch all of our WordPress CMS media library each time, sometimes it would just crash during build. Also we grew the need for good SEO suppor…
"building took forever" -> That's how they make money (which is fine). https://www.gatsbyjs.com/cloud/
I tried using their build tools to improve our build times but they didn't work and they never got back to me in a timely fashion so I gave up on it.