August 26th, 2020
I finally had some free time while working from home during this pandemic. I figured it was time to completely overhaul my personal site and learn a few new things along the way.
Along came Gatsby.
Holy moly, what an amazing framework. I had been to an Open Source SC meetup where a speaker gave a presentation on it and thought it was interesting, but I didn't fall in love with it until I got my hands dirty. I'm a staunch believer in that most basic, rudimentary sites don't need to be powered by a big ol' framework (though a lot are these days) and this solves that. Static pages generated with the features I've come to know and love of React. Sign me up.
The community support for Gatsby rules, too. I've been lost scrolling through the official plugins page. They're all so simple to add and are pretty much plug and play. Just setup and fine tune 'em in a config file. This blog post is coming to you from one that allows me to query Contentful blog posts via GraphQL.
That leads me into the next thing I've really come to take away from this project- GraphQL. I've read various articles about this query language for a while now, but using it first hand was a great experience. While, yes, it is definitely more suited and designed for larger scale applications where REST API's would be cumbersome, I still see the promise in it. Setting up the schema to pull blog posts and having it self document along the way was so seemless. There's a great course on Udemy I plan to enroll in to really hone my skills with it.
A lot of frameworks seem to be flavors of the week, in my opinion. Just reinventions of the wheel. But, I really do see promise in Gatsby and plan to keep up with its development and support for a long time to come.