September 2020 Summaries

Will Johnson's narrative in the "Voices of Gatsby" series illustrates his transformative journey from working grueling factory jobs to entering the tech industry without a formal degree. Facing harsh working conditions and financial challenges, Johnson embarked on a self-directed learning path in web development, inspired by Colt Steele's course. Despite lacking a traditional tech background, he actively built both local and online communities, sharing his progress and supporting others, primarily through platforms like Twitter. His relentless networking efforts and dedication eventually led him to connect with industry figures such as Joel Hooks, co-founder of egghead.io, where he secured a role that allowed him to work remotely and enjoy more family time. Johnson's story highlights the power of community engagement and social media in breaking into tech, ultimately culminating in the release of his ebook, "Break Into Tech with Twitter," encouraging others with non-traditional backgrounds to pursue similar paths.

Gatsby Cloud has introduced a new feature called Workspaces, which enhances the platform's ability to manage multiple sites and projects for Gatsby-built sites and apps. Replacing the previous Gatsby Organizations management tool, Workspaces offers a more flexible approach by allowing users to group sites under different subscription levels within a single login, making it easier to manage clients and projects with various payment plans. The update also introduces the ability to source sites from GitLab, in addition to GitHub, with plans to support Bitbucket soon. This change reflects a broader re-architecting effort to make the platform less dependent on GitHub, facilitating the integration of additional version control systems in the future. Workspaces aims to improve collaboration for developers and content creators by enabling more efficient project organization and user management, with new features like a centralized Members tab for managing roles and permissions. The iterative release approach allows users to benefit from new functionalities as soon as they are ready, supporting Gatsby Cloud's goal of creating a highly collaborative environment.

In 2018, the Kentico Kontent DevRel team began developing a source plugin for Gatsby, a popular static site generator, to address the challenge of increasing build times for large sites. As automatic builds could be triggered by minor content changes, developers and content creators faced long waiting periods to preview updates. The introduction of Gatsby Cloud's Incremental Builds with real-time previews offered a solution, but required significant CMS adjustments, including GraphQL schema integration and webhook notifications. Ondrej Chrastina, a developer advocate at Kentico, spearheaded the creation of a new Gatsby source plugin with a focus on performance, reducing build times from 38 minutes to 7 minutes for a site with 30,000 nodes. This was achieved by minimizing dependencies, simplifying data contracts, and using TypeScript for type safety. The enhancements made Kentico Kontent the fastest data source for Gatsby, earning recognition from the static site benchmarking service, Willit.build.

Jess Watson, a Black tech business owner, reflects on her decade-long journey navigating entrepreneurship in a challenging landscape marked by systemic racism and economic hurdles. She shares the emotional toll and isolation she experiences while striving to sustain her business, often feeling like an anomaly in a predominantly white tech environment. Despite the daunting statistics on business failures and the financial challenges faced by minority-owned businesses, Watson remains committed to her work and finds hope in the growing grassroots changes within the tech community. Inspired by figures like Arlan Hamilton and organizations like Baltimore Womxn in Tech, she aspires to shift her focus from mere survival to thriving, viewing her business as part of a larger movement toward equity and inclusion. Watson’s ultimate goal is to confidently envision a future where her company and others like it are not only surviving but flourishing.

Content marketers face challenges when creating websites that effectively tell their organization's story, particularly for mission-driven organizations like Starlight Children's Foundation and Impossible Foods. Both organizations initially struggled with inflexible websites that hindered their ability to update content and engage their audiences. By re-platforming to Gatsby and a headless CMS like Contentful, they transformed their sites into dynamic, easy-to-modify storytelling platforms. This change allowed them to build reusable content modules, leading to faster content updates and a more seamless user experience. As a result, Starlight's website saw significant improvements in user engagement, with increased visitor numbers and session durations. This transition underscored the importance of adopting flexible and efficient content management strategies to meet business goals and enhance storytelling capabilities, empowering both organizations to better serve their respective missions.

Linda Watkins shares her journey of transitioning from a career in music, where she passionately played and worked with flutes, to a diverse and successful career in business and technology. Despite having no initial experience in the tech industry, she pursued an MBA to facilitate her career change, facing challenges such as impostor syndrome and the demanding analytical aspects of business finance. Her story highlights the importance of embracing one's unique background and authenticity, as well as understanding that others' negative behaviors often have more to do with their own issues than with oneself. Watkins ultimately found fulfillment in marketing, a field that allowed her to blend analytical skills with creativity, although she remains open to future career shifts. Her narrative emphasizes persistence, empathy, and the courage to explore new interests as key components of a successful career transition.

Raleigh Bikes, a UK-based company and part of the Accell group, sought to improve its online presence by overhauling its slow and sometimes unreliable website, which hindered customer engagement and sales. To address this, they partnered with Oberon, a Dutch digital platform development company, to redesign the site using the Gatsby framework, known for its speed, customizability, and cost-effectiveness. The collaboration focused on enhancing user experience, improving SEO, and ensuring scalability across Accell's various brand sites. The new site, which launched in the summer of 2020, features faster loading times and modern design elements, and has received positive feedback for its performance, setting a precedent for similar upgrades across Accell's digital platforms.

Gatsby Cloud serves as an efficient solution for reducing build times and associated costs for sites built with Gatsby, particularly as they scale or require frequent updates. This platform offers incremental builds, which means only the parts of the site that have changed are rebuilt, significantly cutting down on the "time to build" and thus saving on resources such as hosting minutes. Moreover, Gatsby Cloud supports managing multiple sites from a single monorepo, allowing for streamlined workflows and easy integration with services like Shopify via webhooks. This capability is particularly beneficial in e-commerce scenarios where inventory and product details change regularly. The platform is positioned as a powerful tool for enterprises needing fast, secure, and SEO-optimized sites without the traditional drawbacks of server-side rendering, making it a valuable asset in modern web development.