Jason Lengstorf on GatsbyJS
Episode description
Jason Lengstorf is a developer on the GatsbyJS team.
Jason didn't start his career even remotely in the tech field. He was a musician.
Jason's band didn't have much money, so he learned design to make merch, learned some markup to edit their myspace, eventually learned to build a website for them, then learned backend so his bandmates could upload images and post things.
Jason talks about Gatsby's plans to compete with the more seamless WordPress model. He also talks about gatsby's differences from WordPress and the use cases for each service.
One of Gatsby's strengths is how good it is for learning Javascript and React, you can quickly go from the command line to getting stuff on the screen in two minutes, much like create-react-app, the differences is that with Gatsby you get a data layer and a good deployment story.
Finally, they talk about what it's like to manage a repo that has 964 contributors, 5500 commits, and 936 issues. It was more chaotic in the early days, but they have brought on some people who are helping manage it and are defining better processes.
If you are interested in learning Gatsby, they have recently put much work into revamping their official tutorials.
Check them out here
"Jason Lengstorf on GatsbyJS" Transcript
Topics:- His early musical aspirations that lead to his career as a developer
- Gatsby's goals in creating an agnostic unified data layer.
- The differences between Gatsby and other static site generators
- Gatsby 2 and its many performance upgrades
- Managing a large and active repository