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Gatsbygram Case Study

gatsbyjs.org

56 pointskylemathews16 comments

I have used Gatsby for several projects at work and at home. The current version is great, and the features coming in 1.0 are even better.

At work we switched to Gatsby after trying to use another popular react starter. Our page load dropped from several seconds on slow devices to a few hundred miliseconds.

> Gatsby is simple

Making it simple to use is an awesome and laudable goal, but I wonder whether there isn't also an opportunity here for developers who are not javascript-wizards to learn from the way Gatsby is built. I'm asking for a friend.

The things that make Gatsby tick (esp. 1.0) are decidedly not simple, but they seem like important tools and concepts for developers to understand, even if they don't singlehandedly master them.

Definitely! I hope to write walk-throughs, etc. on how things work.

(Author of post and Gatsby)

Hi Kyle! Gatsby is awesome! Thanks so much for your work on it :) Just wanted to give my 2 cents as someone new to javascript/react who recently took it up for a side project. I found it very easy to stay on the 'gatsby rails' so to speak, but once I tried doing some things that probably were not as standard, I had to spin my wheels for a bit to figure out how to get things to work. For example, figuring out how the metadata flows, and figuring out how the folder structures get populated in the public directory were places that I had(and still have) some trouble with. But then again, the fact that someone with no web dev experience such as myself was able to do anything at all is a testament to how great this framework is. Looking forward to the next few releases :)

Cool! Really happy to hear you've found it useful.

And yeah... 0.x is definitely too magical. A lot of the changes in 1.0 are to make things more explicit and less magical. So even if there's a bit more typing, you'll feel more in control. 1.0 will also be adding a theme system which will hopefully preserve the "really easy to get going feel" while making it much easier to program whatever your project dictates once you deviate from the norm.

Having PWA optimizations by default is a huge win for sites where speed is money (marketing sites, landing pages) and pretty good for the rest of us too.

It's great watching the ability to create fast sites by default built into modern frameworks like React rather than by returning to 90s web dev minimalism.

Absolutely. The web platform and web development tools have gotten incredibly good but can require a herculean effort to understand what's possible, how to use the tools, and get good performance. As the post points out , even instagram is missing out on a lot of performance optimizations.

Gatsby aims to be a compiler of sorts to simplify making really high performance websites so even low-budget websites and webapps can join in the fun.

Gatsby is awesome, as evidenced by this demo and as I've learned building a site or two with it.

@kylemathews, I'd love to see a one-pager on the differences and improvements between the upcoming 1.0 release and the 0.x stable branches. Jumping around Github issues and PRs to track it is difficult.

That's definitely coming. Before the 1st beta for sure. Still ironing out a handful of core features...

Also planning to build a "compatibility plugin" which should make upgrading pretty easy.

These are pretty amazing performance numbers. Did you account for all the bloat instagram has in the form of tracking and the likes? (I assume you didn't implement tracking in their magnitude)

Tracking shouldn't affect performance numbers much. The main problems Instagram seems to have is a) they don't server rendered HTML (so nothing shows until the client JavaScript is ready) and b) they don't use a service worker so the repeat visit scores aren't as good.

Is it possible to add some dynamic behaviour? like update 'Likes' in gatsbygram photo.

Absolutely. Gatsby sites are built with React which means it's very easy to add interactive behavior in the client that communicate with a backend API.

just chiming in to say I'm a fan of what you're doing with Gatsby - I think this is the first this-generation SSG to be good enough to replace Jekyll as the defacto :)

thanks Jon!

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