What is Gatsby?

At one point in time as a web developer, the only objective was to get content out into the world at a particular URL for it to be consumed. In today's world of website development, the team has to consider much more. The content existing on a page is not good enough. Some of the considerations in this modern world are:

• Performance
• Scalability
• Security
• SEO
• Accessibility

June of 2017 Gatsby made its first beta appearance to solve some of these modern issues. This open-source JavaScript framework allows development teams to build fast, optimized websites that remain flexible to meet the change in business needs.

Gatsby does this by generating static HTML, resource pre-fetching, image optimization, and prioritizing critical styling. Under the hood Gatsby uses familiar modern frontend development technologies:

• Babel
• ESLint
• GraphQL
• React
• Redux
• Webpack

Once the shell of your site is created. There are several features you will want to implement. Such as adding Google Analytics, Sass compilation, a sitemap. All of these and more can be implemented with relative ease. The Gatsby ecosystem contains a plethora of plugins that can simply be added to your site with little configuration. For those more advanced use cases. One can develop a custom plugin to hook into the build process.

The next post in this series will walk through the machine setup process and the shell of a Gatsby site.