Finally I have completed my second Portfolio, but this time is fully dynamic.

This Portfolio is realised with Gatsby and Contentful CMS. It took me a while because I was not doing just this but obviously I did my best to completed it in the shortest time possible.I will tell you my experience with Gatsby.

My Experience

Building the project with Gatsby was Fun but at the same time a bit stressful, Gatsby is a fantastic static site generator that give you a tones of possibility and 1 of the good thing is that you don't have to worry about routing, where if you use create-react-app you will have to use react-router manually and create your routing which I think it's great to learn as much things as possible, but if you are in a hurry to create something for a client or for yourself, I will go with Gatsby unless you know Next.js that is quite similar to Gatsby but personally I haven't tried yet.

One of the problem with Gatsby are the plugins, don't get me wrong they are great and you can do pretty much everything but most of the time you will have an issue with it because they don't seem to work and this could be a cache problem as a different problem that you have no idea why is working in 1 component and not in the other, this is my personal experience as new developer but I think that the big issue of Gatsby is the cache, you have to constantly clean it otherwise something may not work properly.

The server part that you have to constantly open and close to see changes could be another problem if the project is big. My portfolio does not have a lot of content so when you have to close and open again is quick but with a big project and a lot of contents coming from a CMS or even just using MD or MDX it will take quite a bit and if you think that you have to do it every time that you make a change in the gatsby-config.js that is the file for all your plugins it will make you think twice before to chose it.

As new possible developer using Gatsby is great because you have a chance to use a lot of languages.

Now you know that if you want to become a web developer, you will have to start with HTML and CSS and than JavaScript, the thing is that when you start, everything may be overwhelming because you are starting with HTML and you think oh my god I have to remember all these tags and then there is CSS with all these properties and than I will have to jump on JavaScript that it will be just the starting point of a bigger programming Eco-system and how will I remember all of this? if I jump on JavaScript I will forget for sure HTML and CSS.

The answer is yes you can't remember everything, and you don't have to because it's impossible. Starting JavaScript for sure you will forget 50% of what you learnt cause you are focusing and spending your time on something different but it is completely fine because this is a developer life, from what I have learnt yes you master the basics and your knowledge with grow with you at every project that you will create, because every project will use something different but the basics are always pretty much the same.

Now my point after all this talking is that Gatsby is great cause with it you will have to use many languages that will refresh your knowledge that you lost trying to learn a new topic.

Building this Portfolio with Gatsby I had to use HTML, SASS , Styled Component, React ,JavaScript, GraphicQL and more, that has been a very very good refresher for me.

Conclusion

Closing this post I would recommend Gatsby to every new comer to refresh your knowledge and learn new things at the same time but be a little bit patient for the issues that you will find with the plugins.

As I like to think

Issues brings new knowledge.

so surround yourself with a lot of issues ;)

Stay Safe

Michele