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> 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.

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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.

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