Gatsby will be the best “no code” tool

Gatsby is inventing a new category of websites

Gatsby + WordPress is a great combination

How Gatsby works

Sketching exercises

Blocks enables non-developers to code, visually

Gatsby Admin enables non-developers to configure their sites

Gatsby recipes enables non-developers to setup their sites

# Gatsby
> _Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps. ([gatsbyjs.org](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/))_

I started working at Gatsby in February of 2020. (see [I am joining Gatsby](https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/gatsby)) Here are some of the thoughts I have had related to it since then:

- [[Gatsby is inventing a new category of websites]]
- [[Gatsby will be the best “no code” tool]]
- [[Gatsby + WordPress is a great combination]]
- [[The benefits of static websites]]
- [[How Gatsby works]]
- [[Sketching exercises]]




Gatsby

# Gatsby + WordPress is a great combination
WordPress as a CMS is fantastic, lots of end-users know and love it. However, the dynamic nature of any website you build with it is not ideal, particularly since a large number of WordPress sites do not need to be rendered for every request.

[[The benefits of static websites]] are key for most use cases WordPress users have. At the moment, they have to spend a lot of time fine-tuning performance and SEO. [[Gatsby]] comes with all of that out of the box, and is cheaper to host and scales infinitely.

Specific to [[Gatsby]], it is easier (and will only get easier) to hire JavaScript engineers than to hire PHP engineers nowadays. The development experience is also much better.

Further, [[Gatsby will be the best “no code” tool]].




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The benefits of a dynamic website

# Gatsby is inventing a new category of websites
Imagine a static site generator that can rebuild a website with fresh data in less than five seconds (or even one second).

Combined with a CDN that deploys to hundreds of locations around the world in ~200ms ([Fastly](https://www.fastly.com/network-map)), new data would be live for all visitors in less than ten seconds.

That would make it possible for many (now) dynamic sites to be built as static ones, with all [[The benefits of static websites]] (performance, scalability, uptime, cost,…) included! 

While it’s technically a set of static HTML files on a CDN in the end, the architecture is neither truly static or dynamic, but something in-between.

That is what [[Gatsby]] is working towards—and [we are getting close](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2020-01-27-announcing-gatsby-builds-and-reports/). 🤯

----

I was sold on this idea when I realised that we could have architected [[Spectrum]], a public real-time chat app, like this. Here is what I wrote in our Slack at the time:

> _If build + deployment of new content is fast and stable enough (< 1s?) new content is available super quickly everywhere around the world, no matter where the db is—it’s just a bunch of static HTML files after all. In theory, we could’ve built Spectrum with that architecture and made it much more scalable, performant and stable!_

 🤯🤯🤯




# The benefits of static websites
* **Performance**: static HTML files served from a CDN at the edge (i.e. at hundreds of locations around the world) are the fastest way to deliver content to your users
* **Scalability**: rather than having to muck around with scaling servers or databases, your website will scale to infinite visitors without any work required on your part
* **100% Uptime**: your users will always be able to access the site and its content super quickly, no matter how your backend is doing
* **SEO**: search engines include performance and uptime in their ranking algorithms
* **Security**: static sites cannot get hacked and the backend can be decoupled and hidden to the world at large
* **Cost**: no need to pay $$$ for a huge db




@mxstbr's working notes

The benefits of static websites

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What do you think?