How do you learn / evolve with Gatsby? 🤨

I've been thinking a lot about learning Gatsby and if there are ways we could improve it... But before doing anything, I need your input to learn what is really relevant, so do you mind answering the following (quick) questions? No need to answer all of them 😄

Other than the docs, where do you search for knowledge on Gatsby? How does that work for you?
What areas of Gatsby were / are the hardest for you to learn?
And, finally, what do you think of the Gatsby community?

Have an amazing day and thank you for your time ❤

Google. Sometimes if I'm lucky I've saved a relevant link in my bookmarks, or Twitter. If I want to learn something new though I check out Jason Lengstorf on YouTube. He does a consistent livestream series where he teams up with developers to do various things with Gatsby, like e-commerce or the new experimental themes. I also recommend following the Gatsby team on Twitter, you'll see them respond to people's questions/edge cases all the time and debug issues publicly.
Page queries vs static queries, and the flow of data through the app. As a dev from previous apps, there were reflexes I had that had to be rewired in the static, GraphQL world that Gatsby lives in. Stuff like querying related posts was tricky, cause you have to query anything with dynamic inputs (like a post ID) on the "server" or page level instead of the component level with a static query. It makes a lot of dumb components, but overly smart pages, and GQL fragments only go so far.
It's been one of the best communities I've seen in OSS in a while. They have a handle down on being friendly, encouraging contributions on any level, and working with you through things. In turn, things like Gatsby's docs end up being fantastic because of the endless user input improving them.

Thanks for the thorough answer, Ryosuke!

I've only watched a couple of Jason's livestreams so far, but checked it again after your comment and he surely has a ton of valuable stuff there... And, of course, Google always saving us devs haha

Totally agree with your take on GraphQL queries being too concentrated on pages and reliant on gatsby-node, and I'm hoping the OSS project goes in that direction 🤔

As for the community, the responses to this very post are quite representative of how awesome it is 💜

I like and don't like Gatsby. If I don't have any other work, other than working with Gatsby or Next, then I prefer Gatsby. But if I have options, for example, to build a B2B dynamic app using plain React, then I prefer that.

In general, I like it when I do custom development and don't like it when I have to work with integrating with other products, apis, frameworks.

There are very few use cases (only handful of companies capable of raising Series A and beyond) who can afford custom React development, the kind of work that I like.

Interesting take, Vijay Thirugnanam... What exactly are your reasons for disliking Gatsby? Is it too restrictive on your workflow?

And what are your hurdles when integrating Gatsby apps with other products, APIs and frameworks?

I'm learning Gatsby myself, after years of building websites with WordPress.

I've found the learning curve to be quite steep, but that's partly because I'm learning Javascript at the same time.

A good look through the various Gatsby Starters is helpful. It's really useful to install them locally and then browse the source code, making changes to see how it affects the page in the browser.

I've cherry picked various bits of functionality that I like from different starters and attempted to bring them over into my own project.

I find the community to be excellent.

My path was:

Building numerous dummy websites
Reading a bunch of docs and tutorials
Keeping an eye on the issues list, sometimes it's not you, it's Gatsby
Taking things from development to production for the company I was working for at the time. The website is now down 😢, just found out recently they gave up on that project.

The most difficult part... wrapping my mind around GraphQL and making it easy for others to use the site I've built.

(Warning - I'm far from a developer, just a marketer who loves messing around with static website builders)

And the community is great, I have to admit I relied on a lot of tutorials to learn how to use Gatsby. 👏 😎

Awesome, Milica! I can relate a lot to this path of yours, quite similar to mine except the last one haha

Hope this project has at least served you to learn a lot 😄

Thread

How do you learn / evolve with Gatsby? 🤨

Responses(3)

Recent threads

Search Hashnode

How do you learn / evolve with Gatsby? 🤨

Responses(3)

Recent threads