Treder Design was my very first Gatsby project and the best coding experience I had in years.
Gatsby is an open source framework for building websites. Powered by React and GraphQL, Gatsby delivers superb speed of the final user experience and an unmatched ease of development from the first npm install (replace with yarn add if you really have to).
What makes it so great?
- Detailed documentation.
- Simplified config and great CLI tool.
- Simplification of everything that can make development in pure React complex (routing, webpack).
An overzealous dev troll (and we know they are out there) would likely point out, that Gatsby is nothing that one couldn't achieve with pure React. Or better with pure JS. Or better with the binary code! Turing Machine is likely not out of the question neither. We all know how those valuable debates tend to go.
But in that case the troll would be right. Gatsby doesn't rely on the magic of pure innovation. Gatsby makes modern frontend development approachable. And today that's more than enough to achieve greatness.
My limited experience with Gatsby made me think about Gatsby as a design tool. Gatsby paired with a design system could empower non-coding designers to create new experience by either configuring them directly in JSX or perhaps, down the road, by designing directly in markdown.
This is not out of the question and makes me want to explore the connection between Gatsby and UXPin Merge.
What a time to be alive.