I definitely understand the disbelief, but this is the truth. I started visiting hacker news to try to familiarize myself with the tech world, learn new jargon, blah blah blah, and have always just lurked. I think so highly of Gatsby that I finally created an account just to say so.
Like I said, I come from a graphic design background. Mostly freelancing and working for different organizations that just needed an in house guy to do a little bit of everything. Low pay stuff in non-tech organizations - literally a small boutique in one case where I also managed retail workers. I never really got a good career off the ground for many reasons, one of which was probably the "great recession". Not a ton of demand for mediocre graphic designers who aren't very career oriented to begin with.
Probably around 4 years ago I got it in my head that maybe I could learn to build websites and either get a side hustle going or work my way into it. I did online courses, videos, etc., but never had the money or guts to jump into a code camp or something more legit, and honestly nothing really stuck.
Started a new graphic design gig around 3 years ago. The company was in Real Estate. Like I said - large sales team that really needs their own mini-sites within a site as the service we provide is really driven by their personal brands and relationships. As a designer on a small design team I mostly produced print ads for the sales folks - we were like a mini agency and a way of recruiting top talent. A strong corporate brand / web presence hasn't been necessary to create a successful company of just under 1000 employees, although everyone involves knows that it would only help the business. Pretty shortly into my time there I watched the web team (this includes a project manager, front end developer, ui/ux designer, 3 person SEO/analytics team, a content/data entry person, a middle manager for all of them, and some resources from the IT department) fall apart. That group wasn't really producing much - they refused to even build landing pages, didn't do any kind of SEM, etc. This is for a variety of reasons many of them political. Maybe this entire environment seems a little crazy, but I think this is far more common in many industries than people involved in tech might realize.
At some point an agency was brought in to manage the web presence, but they were very obviously neglecting our site. Managers in my department knew I had done some web in the past and used me to run around the agency. The agency kind of knew it, and even had me do stuff on their behalf - I didn't care it beat designing ads for local newsletters, and mailers. A really generous javascript developer at the agency mentioned Gatsby to me once, saying that he wanted to build everything on it, including the next iteration of our website. I could see the writing on the wall, so I decided to learn it thinking(hoping) that I might have to maintain a Gatsby site one day. I think 1.0 had just been released at that point. Not long after, they were fired and I was left holding the ball.
The site I inherited was built on wordpress. Because of the neglect it was many versions out of date, and rotting the way wordpress sites can when they aren't maintained. I did what I could to hold it together and doubled down on learning Gatsby and React. When I started replatforming our website it was a lot of false starts, I played with Hugo, headless wordpress in Gatsby, all kinds of schemes - honestly figuring it out as I went along. Eventually stuff started coming together. Each feature I was forced to build (was making an exact duplicate of the wordpress site) forced me to learn more about the toolset that was organically coming together - gatsby (which includes react and graphql), netlify, contentful, mailgun (remember that complicated form routing/logic), and more. I asked the IT dept, what the wordpress instance for our og site was costing us and learned it was $500+ a month. I did everything I could to keep us in Contentful and Netlify free tiers and have done so. We do pay $15/month for a service that does some form routing/templating magic for us - but that's the only cost these days.
In the end it took me around 6months to do something that would have taken an agency a month to fulfill. But, I also helped on a lot of random projects (it's amazing what people will let you be a part of when you are eager), and served as webmaster for the first site. During that time leadership at my company wasn't really ready to think about web, so in the end I have provided a great value - a huge cost savings for them over what they were spending and even what they otherwise would be today. I think a lot of people here would cringe to look at my code. It looks like what was written by who it was - someone learning as they went. But, nothing ever breaks, site hasn't been down once since replatforming and moving to netlify, site traffic has increased, we finally pass security audits, page load time went from 8seconds average to somewhere around 1-2 seconds on average. I spin up landing pages regularly, and have plans for meeting unique industry needs in a way that is doable and maintainable by just me.
At the end of the day I'm a novice who's making it work on my end mostly by force of will in an industry where a web presence is only just starting to matter. BUT none of it would be doable without Gatsby. Their community, documentation, and product are all amazing. I'm convinced that if my story didn't include Gatsby I wouldn't be provided the opportunities I currently.
If you want to be cynical you can interpret all of that as 'guy at shitty company, in shitty industry, where web really doesn't matter, uses Gatsby to make site that just works, and saves a marginal amount of money that definitely had to be spent (hosting costs) and a large amount of money that probably shouldn't have ever been spent (bloated web team and agency that sat on their asses).'
from not enough detail to waaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy too much