This is my developer story with Gatsby (after I had used it few years before).
Inb4 What is Gatsby?
Gatsby is a Static Site Generator (SSG) tool used to quickly develop SEO-optimized web pages. At least, that was what it was supposed to be for me. But my journey wasn't as fast as I had expected.
CAVEAT: Even though I've used somewhat spicy language here and a clickbait title, Gatsby is still great! Apparently, my expectations were just too high for this tool. I would definitely recommend any beginner to senior React developers to create their static site with this. I've created this blog with Gatsby and I am not moving to any other platform as long as they keep Gatsby alive.
Story Time
It's been approximately 13 years, if not more, since I started my blog on Blogger, under the good old blogspot.com subdomain. While it served its purpose well, it has become dated and no longer meets my needs. The time has come to transition to a better platform.
And so my story with Gatsby began!
The Qucik Start Tutorial is NOT that quick
I am not a total stranger to either React or Gatsby. The last thing I would want to do is start from scratch. I can't do much with a bare minimum Gatsby project. Once I started adding more features with additional packages, I fell into an endless loop of struggles with dependency problems related to Gatsby packages. Thankfully, I pass this stage quickly and went with themes.
Here is the link to tutorial btw.
I've started with oudated theme with bugs
Gatsby's official documentation suggests you use an outdated theme for creating a blog. For example, the latest version of Gatsby is on 5.11.0, while the theme's peer dependency is on ^4.24.7 at the time of writing. I didn't make a huge fuss about it until I realized it had FOUC (Flash of Unstyled Content) and broken style issues on mobile browsers. You can check the issue here. Fixing these issues is not easy to investigate and resolve. In the end, you choose Gatsby to ship fast, not to solve its issues by the time you've started.
Switched to boilerplate
The previous problem cost me hours of work until I realized it. Well, red flags were everywhere, but I was too blind to see them. So, instead of going with gatsby-theme-blog, I cloned the Gatsby Starter Blog Boilerplate. It wasn't outdated, but it didn't have the MDX feature out of the box. This was even more painful as I had spent some time on styling the highlighting lines of the code snippet on previous themed approach.
What was good?
- Throughout my development journey, one thing was consistently excellent - the deployment process was super easy and free!
- It's also important to note that despite the difficulties I faced, using Gatsby was still faster than other options within my knowledge scope. Building something similar from scratch would have taken significantly more time.