Gatsby Adapters

These automatically added “system” plugins and “adapters” have been a huge pain point for my team, especially when it comes to Next.js. Netlify has historically had a serious problem with understanding how open source projects fit into the customer journey on their platform. So now I guess they can have one example where this won’t be true at face value. I hope it was worth it for them.

I’m left wondering however, and others seem to be as well, why all of this is necessary. I’m beginning to view all of this as an admission of failure to build a paradigm-wide higher level abstraction. Why are we writing code to push files around folders in a build step after running a bunch of code that did just that? It feels ludicrous.

If you ask me, Netlify should have opted to focus on appropriately monetizing their core platform a long time ago. We love it! Yet here we are shoving whole servers in lambdas that go cold and pulling magic tricks like sacrificing the first site visitor’s user experience so we can optimize some images for subsequent visitors. Please just be an excellent static deployment platform and nothing else. I’m begging you, Netlify. If it can’t be done I’m afraid they’re on some kind of attention-deficit, VC-driven death march.

Who is still using Gatsby?