Working full-time on Gatsby

After several years of working on a startup, I’ve recently quit. The reasons are quite boring—poor product traction and we ran out of money— so I won’t go into that here. But the exciting part is that I’m now free to work more on some of my open source projects! Two in particular, Gatsby.js and Typography.js.

Gatsby.js is a React.js static site generator that marries ease of use with modern web technologies. Typography.js is a toolkit for building websites with beautiful typography. This site uses both Gatsby.js & Typography.js!

I’m looking for both direct sponsorship and consulting/contracting opportunities for these projects. Please contact me if you’re thinking about using Gatsby/Typography.js in a major way or have interesting and/or high-value projects you’d like help on. Web agencies and larger companies looking for new web toolchains would be great fits.

Both these projects are very exciting and meaningful to me. I’ve been building websites and web apps for a long time now and they both are a compilation of a decade+ of thought about and experimentation into what is the perfect toolset for building for the web.

Both projects were also, interestingly, by-products of working on my startup RelateRocket. Gatsby started when I needed to create a website for RelateRocket and wanted to avoid using anything other than React.js. Typography.js started when we were thinking about building a product that’d automatically create personalized landing pages for sales reps to send and I started thinking about how to easily/quickly emulate the typography and other design choices from our customers’ websites. It is satisfying that although the startup didn’t succeed, something of value has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

Now that my full attention is on Gatsby, I have a number of ideas I’m working on that I’m really excited about.

• Service workers & offline support. Service workers are perhaps the most exciting technology that’s come to the web in the past several years. It makes possible (finally) sophisticated client caching plus true offline support. I’m adding excellent on-by-default support to Gatsby for Service Workers and a great offline experience.
• Code splitting. A great website loads really fast. Code splitting is a technique for ensuring that every page loads with only the code that’s necessary for that page.
• Themes & Plugins. Wordpress & Jekyll are both great examples of open source communities with robust theme & plugins ecosystems. I’d love something like that to develop around Gatsby.
• Website & Documentation/Tutorials. Somewhat ironically for a website building tool, Gatsby doesn’t yet have a website. This will be fixed, plus I’ll be writing high-quality documentation and tutorials.
• Pull instead of Push. This last idea is a bit abstract but super powerful. Currently, data in Gatsby (like pretty much every static site generator) is pushed into templates to be rendered into HTML. This is a simple pattern and works great for many use cases. But when you start working on more complex sites, you really start to miss the flexibility of building a database-driven site. With a database, all your data is available to query against in any fashion that you’d like. Whatever bits of data you need to assemble a page, you can pull in. You want to create author pages showing their bio & last 5 posts? It’s just a query away. I want this same flexibility for Gatsby. I want to be able to query my markdown files and treat them as a database of sorts. I’ve hit on what I think is an excellent way to do this and am prototyping the code. Expect to hear more on this soon. Ping me if you’d like an early demo. It’s using GraphQL under the hood and the collocated queries pattern developed by Relay. I couldn’t be more excited about this feature. It’ll open up so many useful and powerful options.

The web is an incredible place. I’m so happy I get to help build it. If Gatsby or Typography.js excite you, I’d love you to join in helping design & document & build them.

Also a quick endnote. I noticed while writing this that my first blog post was a bit over 10 years ago! Happy anniversary blog! :-)