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Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

forbes.com

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Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#61

Post by r_deckard »

strbean wrote: post #51
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's different from wordpress, for the reason I mentioned above. The main value proposition of static site generators COMPARED TO 1st generation CMS like Wordpress is that they don't require a database and are lightweight and portable. It is common sense that not everyone will want to run their own database and a server, so a wordpress.com makes sense. But static sites can be deployed anywhere and there already is a…

Sounds like their offering will basically consist of some fairly simple CI and some static hosting, right? Those things (particularly the CI) are incredibly trivial to setup for someone who is technically proficient. It might be a hurdle for someone who is primarily a designer with a bit of HTML/CSS knowledge and a "copy and paste heavy" understanding of JS. I think a large proportion of static sites are built by peo…

From what i know, their CI offering tries to aim for very quick build times. Quick as in quick enough to actually allow dynamic looking website to be built with gatsby statically (eg. site rebuilt on every user post). Even their pricing reflects this, they charge by how many times the site is updated, regardless of build time.

I think that looks like a pretty hard problem, i wouldn’t call their CI simple.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#62

Post by elviejo »

ritchiea wrote: post #3

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages functi…

I started to use Gatsby. I cannot believe what an over engineered piece of... Software?? It is.

Do you want to display markdon files?? Oh that would be plugin.

Ok I got the plugin. Can I display a Markdown now?

Not yet you must write a GraphQL!!! query to read the contents of your file.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#64

Post by talkinghead »

ritchiea wrote: post #3

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages functi…

used gatsby for my portfolio website and recently wanted to add a p5 sketch into it and went round the houses for about 2 hours as i did an update which broke everything.

ended up sacking it off, creating a static html/css/vanilla site text right in tag and boom done in about 20 mins.

ridiculously over-engineered. use react if you want the madness, plain if you want to just do something normal

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#65

Post by underwater »

ritchiea wrote: post #3

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages functi…

We use Gatsby with Contentful for our marketing site and blog. It's been a nightmare.

We publish content multiple times a week. It's taken a huge amount of effort and paying Gatsby a lot of money for their SaaS products to get a setup that any serious publisher (like a newspaper) would laugh at.

The whole product being built around static site generation is a huge limitation. Things like republishing at a reasonable cadence and previewing changes require massive kludges and huge amounts of infrastructure to make work.

Static site generation is a niche product. Gatsby are trying to replace dynamic server side rendering, and in the short term will win people over with the upsides. But long term people are going to hate the limitations.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#66

Post by bgorman »

talkinghead wrote: post #64
ritchiea wrote: post #3

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages functi…

used gatsby for my portfolio website and recently wanted to add a p5 sketch into it and went round the houses for about 2 hours as i did an update which broke everything. ended up sacking it off, creating a static html/css/vanilla site text right in tag and boom done in about 20 mins. ridiculously over-engineered. use react if you want the madness, plain if you want to just do something normal

Yeah Gatsby is a solution looking for a problem. As far as I am concerned it is the peak of buzzword driven development.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#67

Post by fardeem »

hn_reddit_human wrote: post #35

Does the commercial offering from Gatsby offer hosting? I couldn't figure it out from the https://gatsbyjs.com page. Gatsby and NextJS (Vercel) are both backed by CRV[1,2]. It seems like a fairly competitive overlap. Would love to hear takes from folks on HN about the feasibility and comparison of Gatsby's and Vercel's business models and competitive overlaps. [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200527005268…

Haven't really used Gatsby but vercel is magical. Like once you link up your GitHub repo, the fact that everything works so smoothly is delightful. A lot of other platforms try to compete with vercel on ease of use (heroku) but doesn't even come close. Next.js + vercel seems like cheating honestly

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#69

Post by jshawl »

tomnipotent wrote: post #45
jshawl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I wasn’t expecting a “static site generator” to require a JavaScript runtime.

Technically it doesn't. Unless developers add a bunch of logic to run in JS after the page loads (e.g. React's useEffect), everything it needs to render should work just fine without JS enabled.

You're right that HTML is generated with `gatsby build`.

All of the CSS is loaded from the webpack runtime though.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#70

Post by martinald »

manigandham wrote: post #58
chmac wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, the thing that sets Gatsby apart is the integration of the built static site and React to do pre-fetching. The output from Gatsby is not just HTML, it's HTML + React javascript, with data loaded from JSON files. That means that once the site has loaded, Gatsby can pre-emptively fetch all the linked pages, both React components and data, to give instantaneous second click page loads. That's a pretty impressive…

Web performance doesn't need any of that. Browsers are very good at parsing HTML and CDNs are a commodity now. A directory of HTML files is about as fast as it gets, no preloading necessary (and you avoid all that JS payload too).

Agreed. Many websites these days require 10-100x more time in CPU rendering complex DOMs and running JS than network loading.
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