Why I Chose Gatsby For The Technical Review

Kasey Hinton
Guest Writer

When I first got started on building The Technical Review I had a pretty massive wishlist in regards to the technologies I would consume and the features that these technologies would need to offer.

Tech Stack Wishlist

I needed a tech stack that would give me...

That is a whole lot to ask of a tech stack. Fortunately, I found a perfect fit for my new company – Gatsby for my front-end and Netlify for my CMS and Hosting. There is an element of risk regarding using such a new framework for an important project; however, I am glad I chose this stack in hindsight. Gatsby is no longer in its infancy. We are working with a 2.0 release of Gatsby that is supported by a now VC funded company and a growing community. There is plenty of plugins to get started, and they cover most of the basics. With this said there is still much room for growth regarding plugins. If you are expecting a Wordpress amount of premium themes and plugins, you will be disappointed.

Starter Kit Availability

The starter kits available are quite basic. With these kits, you will have solid barebones to get started in your tech stack of choice. You cannot go from 0 to 100 like you can when purchasing a high-quality Wordpress theme. However, if you are familiar with modern technologies like React and GraphQL, you will find your development experience extremely satisfying. I have noticed that with Gatsby I have a stable foundation, which allows me to add features with relative ease and painlessness.

Plugin Architecture

The plugin architecture is so sharply defined and reasonably easy to use as most of the plugins are adequately documented. Here are a few of the useful plugins I added to my app.

The process for adding plugins is smooth too. An example of the necessary steps is as follows.

Step 1

Install the plugin with this command. `yarn add gatsby-plugin-offline`

Step 2

Add the plugin to your gatsby-config.js 
module.exports = {
        plugins: [
                'gatsby-plugin-offline'
        ]
}

Step 3

Profit.

Offline support added with only a few keystrokes and less than five minutes of your time. Also, Since I chose to use Netlify, I got to use their continuous deployment. Meaning new features that I push to my Github repository automatically build and deploy, getting my code into production even faster.

Anyone looking for a great set of technology to build their next application with should at least have a look at Gatsby. If you'd like to check out the app I created visit The Technical Review.
Kasey Hinton