First impressions of Gatsby

The installation was super easy. I've used Gatsby a few times now, and I've had no issues in the installation process. I've used the Hello World starter and the Forestry-tweaked blog starter so far.

Gatsby's documentation is excellent and newbie-friendly. They even have tutorials from setting up to site publishing. They also have very active people on, for example, Twitter. They answer a lot of questions people have about Gatsby.

I also like how instructive Gatsby is, for example, if the commands develop, serve, or build won't run because of an error. It was easy to fix typos and newbie mistakes when you received instant and clear feedback from the command line. No more wondering what "error occurred" might mean.

Gatsby has a ton of plugins you can install from data sources to sitemaps and RSS feeds and just all kinds of things, really. People constantly create new plugins and update the old ones. You can search for the plugins on the Gatsby site and they provide you with detailed installation and usage instructions. The people at Gatsby have put effort into the documentation and usage instructions. I'm a huge fan of clear and precise instructions, so I think Gatsby looks like a perfect match for me.

My favorite plugin so far: Gatsby-image

Gatsby's image functionalities were one reason I was so eager to try out Gatsby. And I was not disappointed! With just a few plugins, I could get responsive lazy-loading images on my site. I don't even know all the magic that happens behind the scenes, but I'm just amazed at how easy they are to use and how good the results are.

I also like the sass plugin because I got to use nesting and mixins. Installation and usage couldn't get any easier, just install the plugin (and node-sass) and start writing.

What I've created so far with Gatsby

I have only been able to use Gatsby on my own projects. The first project I created with Gatsby was my portfolio. It uses a Drupal backend. I have also created this blog as a practice project, and this uses a Forestry backend. I also created another blog project with WordPress as its backend, but it is not released yet.

My blog is hosted on Netlify. I had read that Netlify was easy to use, but I was surprised how easy it was to set up everything, all required steps and settings were well documented and instructed. I really recommend also checking out Netlify! My portfolio is hosted on Kubernetes and the hosting is in the skillful hands of my fiancé. Neither of the sites had difficulties with getting Gatsby builds to work.

Because all of these sites of mine have been small and simple, I hope I get the chance to use Gatsby professionally as well someday. I'd like to see what kind of magic can be created with Gatsby with a bit more complex projects. I'll also probably have something more to say about Gatsby after I've used it more, but I'm really liking it so far. I can't wait to create more projects with it.