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Jamstacked Issue 12

Bringing you up-to-speed on changes at Gatsby

Published: Aug 20, 2020

📮

 JAMstacked

#12 — August 20, 2020

✦ web version

Today's newsletter is different and a bit difficult to write. I prefer to focus on the technology and tools than on the internal issues of any particular company in the Jamstack ecosystem. However, Gatsby is not just any company in Jamstack.

Gatsby, the static site generator, has been repeatedly shown to be the most popular tool for creating Jamstack sites. Gatsby, the company, was among the first to take an open source SSG and turn it into a company (a path others have since followed).

So, this week as Gatsby merged its open source project presence with its company presence and, not coincidentally, had its internal issues spill into public view, it impacts the Jamstack community. Today's main section will try to get you up to speed.

— Brian Rinaldi

↘︎ Focus on Gatsby

Gatsby, United: Introducing A New Gatsbyjs.com, Gatsby Cloud Plan Updates, and A View of Our Roadmap
This announcement triggered a lot of discussion (see below), though largely not around the convergence of the .com and .org sides of Gatsby, which, until now, had mostly kept the for-profit, venture-funded company and the open-source project as separate web presences.

Gatsby

Nat Alison's Twitter Thread on Gatsby
Nat Alison, a former contractor with Gatsby, started a thread based upon the new, combined site announcement that laid out her negative experiences working as a contractor at Gatsby. Some of the key themes she addressed were major concerns about company management, poor treatment of some employees (particularly contractors) and significant issues around the technology and tools Gatsby provides.

Nat Alison on Twitter

Open Letter to the Gatsby Open Source Community
Kyle Mathews, founder and CEO of Gatsby, responded to the community outcry over some of the details shared in Nat’s thread and others that followed. It acknowledges some largely unstated issues but shares some details on organizational changes within the company that he believes will help address the issues.

Gatsby

Open Letter to the Gatsby Community
Gatsby’s employees followed this by banding together to express solidarity with the concerns Nat Alison and others shared, but also to express degree of hope that change can be made internally within the company that will help solve the issues that were raised.

Gatsby Employees

❖ Tidbits

Migrating from Node and Express to the Jamstack - Series
Some interesting insights and experiences on taking a server-rendered Node.js app and converting it to Jamstack with serverless functions and third-party services. Part 2, Part 3.

Raymond Camden

A Community-Driven Site with Eleventy: Preparing for Contributions
The first part in a two-part series that creates a Jamstack site with community contributions using 11ty. This part focuses on setting guidelines and processes for allowing and reviewing contributions.

Stephanie Eckles

Headless CMS: Everything You Need to Know
A good overview of what a headless CMS is, why you should care and what benefits they offer.

Disha Sharma

Optimize SEO and Social Media Sharing in a Nuxt Blog
Adding header tags, social sharing metadata and a sitemap to improve SEO on a Nuxt blog.

Alex Jover Morales

✂︎ Tools and Resources

  • JungleJS - A new static site generator based on the Svelte framework that leverages GraphQL.
  • Elder.js - An opinionated static site generator and web framework for Svelte built with SEO in mind.
  • 50 Projects for React & the Static Web - A new ebook by Colby Fayock that aims to help you learn by building actual projects.
  • Repeater.dev - A new tool in beta that has an API allowing you to set tasks for the future or create repeated tasks.
  • tiiny.host - A new service for quick sharing of static sites by uploading a zip. Free sites only last 3 days (though paid options are available).

As always, I welcome feedback or link suggestion via Twitter. Stay safe and healthy! — Brian