mattkevan

Big fan of static site generators and the whole JAMStack idea in general - I use Jekyll extensively - but after building a site with Gatsby, I found it too over-engineered.

React is great, and definitely has its place, but to set up React, GraphQL and all the surrounding tooling just to assemble some text files into a template seems like complexity for the sake of it.

For me, the fun of static sites - after years of building sites with CMSs like Wordpress and Drupal - is that they’re as close as possible to plain HTML, lightning-fast and very simple.

snake_case
I switched my personal Jekyll site to Gatsby 2 years ago. I ran into some minor bugs and even contributed 3 PRs that got merged. I loved working with it for a few weeks. Two months after switching, it too dawned on me how over-engineered it is. I switched off of it to a custom static site generator I made (admittedly it was also over-engineered), but I'm finally back to a simple static generator called zola [1] and it feels so refreshing.

Not only is Gatsby over-engineered, it's also bloated IMO. I think one of their main selling points it that page loads seem instant. Preloading other pages in the background seems needless to me when we're talking about a simple blog. Sure, it might be good for apps, but forcing my (few) visitors to download needless mbs on desktop or mobile seems like a bad user experience to me.

[1]: https://github.com/getzola/zola