Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by acdha » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #57

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…

> 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 feature in the wild, the second click is neck snappingly fast. Can't you do that much more simply with a simple static site and a service worker?

You don't even need the service worker: just use preload hints for the related content and, if you're really convinced you need to, fetch the content so you can replace the page on a click.

That's usually a waste of time, however, compared to making sure your site is cache-friendly. As most projects have discovered, there are a lot of edge cases for making a JavaScript solution as fast or robust as the built-in browser behaviour.

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

#72

Post by kevincox » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

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).

It really depends on your network connection. If it is fast fetching a small HTML page is nearly instant, if it s not then it will be noticeable compared to locally cached data.

Now you don't need to do it as complex as Gatsby does, you could literally just GET the HTML file and throw away the result so that it is in the cache.

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

#73

Post by moreaccountspls » Wed, May 27, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #31

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…

For you with a technical background, it's different. For Bob the marketing guy, it's just another tool to create a website. There's indeed little magic involved so Gatsby has to do a really good job to keep customers both integration and speed wise.

> For Bob the marketing guy, it's just another tool to create a website.

To me this is the "emperor has no clothes" about the whole ecosystem. The actual users don't care if it's a static file, a database CMS, or a herd of cats running around frantically typing up HTTP responses. So it's odd to me that the big selling point is "we did something neat in how we made our product!". Right, but what does it do to make your users life better than using ghost or wordpress, or whatever?

I know that some devs see it as a rails like thing to combine with graphql, but if I was going that route I personally wouldn't start with something that's ostensibly a static site generator.

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

#74

Post by josefrichter » Wed, May 27, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

Gatsby is very interesting experiment. Pull stuff from all kinds of sources via graphql. I like toying with it.

I just don't see practical use :-) Too complex for non-geeks, too limiting for geeks.

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

#75

Post by sunpazed » Wed, May 27, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

I’ve used Gatsby for generating my wife’s static blog. It’s as simple as adding a new Markdown file, and building. The React workflow makes customising layouts and interactions much easier for those familiar with the ecosystem. For anything more than that, I’d stick to a dynamic framework.

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

#76

Post by julianeon » Wed, May 27, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

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 just couldn't figure out what value Gatsby was supposed to be delivering that was better than any of its competitors.

I thought it was the combination of React plus a nice GraphQL interface. I would think that's a nice combination for your average startup.

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

#77

Post by zomglings » Wed, May 27, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

emerongi wrote: post #37

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…

Where does the $28M go?

Ads + engineers?

Edit: + cloud infrastructure probably

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

#78

Post by floydnoel » Wed, May 27, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #65

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…

why don’t you use the SSR plugin and go that route?

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

#79

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 27, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

chmac wrote: post #17

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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by azangru » Wed, May 27, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

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…

> Gatsby has slick looking docs and a lot of VC money and as far as I can tell a painful development experience.

I have used Gatsby only for small projects, but developer-experience-wise, it's been fantastic, on par with Next.js and better than developer experience of Jekyll or Eleventy, I would say. No pain at all, if you know your way around javascript and react.

But of course the price you pay for that is that a hello world Gatsby app starts at around 60 kB of javascript. Also, service workers, which are nice in principle, but in inexperienced hands might result in stale content or even broken site. I sometimes visit the site of Kent C. Dodds. It's built with Gatsby. It's also using service workers, so every time I visit the site after a couple of weeks or so, the page greets me with the old content; and I have to refresh the page to get the new one. Occasionally, his service workers that have cached the entrypoint webpack file fail to fetch css or js files from previous builds listed there, and the site just shows blank nothingness. It's ironic, really.