What happened to Gatsby

In 2020, I reviewed React for my work and looked at Gatsby to eat my dog food. A year later, we are going forward with Vue, and I am using Gridsome to do what Gatsby was doing. This article came about based on that investigation.

In February of 2020, I started looking at Gatsby for my Blog. We were leaning towards using React.js, and it would have been the right match of touching React and keeping my blog simple to manage and deploy.

We got super busy writing code and supporting our customers. I had very little time to write for myself for the amount of work and writing I had to do for work. By fall, we were starting to push in what direction we wanted to take our platform's future at work and started looking more heavily at Vue.js.

In my opinion, Vue.js was a great move because of its philosophy in the content's redraw. Vue will update only the data bits to which it is bound. On the flipside, React will update the block that holds the data to which it is bound. I'll touch more on this at some point in another article.

I've kept away from work done at my job, which is fine because I'm working on reports, and that keeps me plenty busy.

Since we were moving to work with Vue, I restarted my Blog to work with Vue. I started my old school Vue development but decided instead to look for a Gatsby alternative. I found Gridsome.

Gridsome

Gridsome is for Vue what Gatsby is for React. It has a drawback, though. It is much further behind in development. Gridsome being further behind hasn't scared me. I can help build the bits I need.

I thought about using a hosted content management system as an alternative to the standard Markdown and looked at Sanity. I've used Prismic, and Sanity has some similarities, but they worked more closely with Gridsome, so I took an interest.

It was super simple to put together a Sanity project, and it would be easy to setup and manage long term. The part that always gets me hung up when looking at systems like Sanity, Prismic, etc., is the pricing elements. Will the point where I need to start paying for the service be too cost-prohibitive?

I decided to keep it simple and am starting with Markdown using Remark. I am beginning my file naming conventions to align with i18n to begin planning towards this end.

My hosting was originally on Netlify, but I decided to go back to looking at Firebase. By doing this, I can more closely tie in managing my non-GA analytics and capture my form submissions for a future newsletter.

So what are my plans this year?

I am working on this site to track my work and learning, just as I always do. I am supporting WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace, Shopify, and Webflow for my job. You can bet that I will write here about those platforms.

I do have thoughts about other things about what I would like to write — these tie in with what I want to learn also. At the same time, I have to be realistic with what I can do and how I want to spend my time.

I have thoughts of getting into podcasting, working on educational videos for development and/or design, and more. What is the reality? I am working quite a bit, and we are working at home, which means it has been easy for me to stay at work.

Only time will tell.