From the Gatsby blog on their choice to use headless WordPress for their blog:

The Gatsby blog has content from 133 authors. We’ve published articles from our community, technology partners, and staff members. WordPress enables us to have unlimited users (without paying a subscription per seat). WordPress also comes with powerful role-based permissions and has free plugins from services like Auth0 to unlock flexible security and authentication options. Those features made WordPress a perfect fit for our particular use case.

Gatsby creator Kyle Mathews joins Jerod fresh off the launch of incremental builds to tell the story of this feature that’s 3 years in the making. We talk about Kyle’s vision for Gatsby, why incremental builds took so long, why it’s not part of the open source tool, how he makes decisions between Cloud and open source features, and more.

Why is static the future? How do you define “static”? Read this deep dive from Josh Comeau to find out…

The term “static” can be a little overloaded, and occasionally a little misleading. Here’s how I’d define it:

“A static website is a website where the initial HTML is prepared ahead of time, not dynamically generated by a server on request.”

When you make a request to this website, for example, Netlify serves pre-generated HTML to you. I don’t have a Node server dynamically rendering HTML documents on-the-fly.

Dustin Schau joins the party to talk about the state of Gatsby and the changes and improvements to it in the last year. We talk about what Gatsby delivers to the front end and how it does it quickly with improvements to the build system. Dustin also fields our questions and talks about Gatsby Cloud and where things are going.

Make your site editable in five minutes.

Congrats @KyleMathews and team, wow.

Why the excitement and growth? The answer is simple. Gatsby was founded around a big idea, and that idea is starting to go mainstream. We believe that the basic architecture of websites is being reinvented. The dominant web architecture, the LAMP stack, was founded at the dawn of the web before paradigm-shifting technologies were invented, like virtual machines, AWS, smartphones, Git, Node/NPM, React, and Serverless—elements of modern engineering we now take for granted.

For those interested in the deeper backstory on the formation of Gatsby, check out Founders Talk #59 with Kyle Mathews (the creator of Gatsby).

Our friends at Gatsby just announced the stable release of Gatsby themes.

Chris Biscardi writes on the Gastby blog:

Using a Gatsby theme, all of your default configuration (shared functionality, data sourcing, design) is abstracted out of your site, and into an installable package.

This means that the configuration and functionality isn’t directly written into your project, but rather versioned, centrally managed, and installed as a dependency. You can seamlessly update a theme, compose themes together, and even swap out one compatible theme for another.

What does “stable” mean?

The core theme APIs have been stable for a long time under the __experimentalThemes flag in gatsby-config.js. Since they’re being used in production by a number of different companies to great effect, we’re promoting these APIs, specifically composition and shadowing, to stable within Gatsby core so that people can take advantage of them with confidence.

KBall and Jason geek out on the ins and outs of Gatsby. They talked through the fundamentals of working with Gatsby, the development process, and look into the future of Gatsby.

Lauren Tan:

I recently moved my blog from Medium to a self-managed blog built with Gatsby in the open, then deployed on Netlify. After a few weeks of fiddling around, I feel like I’ve landed on something I’m mostly happy with.

This is a transition we are 💯 behind. Medium is becoming more reader-hostile all the time. Plus, wouldn’t you rather own your own content on a domain you have control over? Of course you would!

The goal of this series of blog posts is to create a personal website using Gatsby V2 from the default starter. The final website will have an index page where you can introduce yourself, a list of all blog posts, individual blog pages, tag pages listing blog posts in specific categories, and a projects portfolio page.

Here’s all the parts to this deep dive.

Part 1: Introduction and Setup
Part 2: Styling with Sass/SCSS
Part 3: Generating Blog Posts with Markdown Files
Part 4: Creating a List of Blog Posts
Part 5: Adding Thumbnail Images to a Blog List
Part 6: Adding Multiple Responsive Images to a Markdown Blog Post
Part 7: Adding Tags to Blog Posts
Part 8: Creating a Project Page from JSON data
Part 9: Pagination, Deploying to Netlify, and SEO

Check out the example repo on GitHub and preview the final website.

Kyle Mathews is the founder and CEO of Gatsby, a new company he’s building around an open source project of the same name. Gatsby as a project describes itself as a flexible modern website framework and blazing fast static site generator for React.js.

At the macro level — Kyle’s career has been focused on a better way to build and ship websites. It seems he’s done just that with Gatsby’s launch in late May 2015…since then he’s taken on a co-founder and a seed round of $3.8M to form Gatsby Inc.

From open source project to a $3.8 million dollar seed round to transform Gatsby.js into a full-blown startup that’s building what’s becoming the defacto modern web frontend. In this episode, we talk with Jason Lengstorf about this blazing-fast static site generator, its building blocks and how they all fit together, the future of web development on the JAMstack (JavaScript + APIs), the importance of site performance, site rebuilds, getting started, and how they’re focused on building an awesome product and an awesome community.

Style Guide Guide is a boilerplate for creating a custom style guide for your organization’s design system. It provides just enough IA and hooks to get you going. As a bonus, I’ve provided links to helpful resources and inspiration to help you as you create your own custom style guide.

Built with Gatsby. Demo here.

Well, Gatsby is officially a startup! They just announced the formation of Gatsby Inc. and have raised a $3.8M seed round to fund the effort. Wow, congrats Kyle and team.

Kyle Matthews writes on the Gatsby blog:

I’m thrilled to announce the formation of Gatsby Inc. Based on the open source project Gatsby I founded, Gatsby the company will make feature-rich and blazing-fast websites easier to build and run.

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is…

• a blazing fast static site generator for React.js
• a powerful and flexible modern website framework that simplifies every step of starting, developing and running websites
• helps you leverage open source innovations in the React, NPM, and Gatsby communities for your web projects
• lets you pull data into pages from WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, markdown—and any other data source you can imagine
• compiles and optimizes your site’s code to make your sites lightning fast—even on mobile

Static site JAMStack generators are on the come-up and Gatsby looks super cool.

This post is a bit heavy on the hype-side, but a good intro nonetheless if you want to check it out without, you know, checking it out.