Today’s guest is Jason Lengstorf, a developer on the GatsbyJS team. Today Jason discusses his career path, what Gatsby accomplishes, how Gatsby compares with other static site generators, what's coming up in Gatsby 2, and what it's like to manage a large open source repo.
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
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
Links:
Jason Lengstorf: