Gatsby Gazette for September 2020: The “What Will It Take For You To Code Like This?” Edition

Hashim Warren
October 2nd, 2020

In September we saw some Software Developers brag about their git commit history, while other devs poked fun at people who brag about their commit histories. And thus, “What Will It Take For You To Code Like This?” was born.

A full green git contribution history doesn’t make you a great developer. However… if you feel the urge to light up your GitHub commit calendar like a Christmas tree, Gatsby has a wave of exciting new features for you to try!

New in Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud

New Design and Capabilities for Gatsby Admin

We launched a new version of Gatsby Admin, with a polished UI and additional features for rapidly configuring your Gatsby project. If you’d like to join the early interest group and give feedback, register here.

Shareable URLs in Gatsby Cloud

Now, you can publish previews of your Gatsby site to a customizable, stable private URL you can share with others. This is perfect for collaborating on a site with a team, and getting feedback before you publish a site to a CDN. Spin up a new site in Gatsby Cloud and try it for yourself.

Other improvements to the Gatsby experience include:

Ward Peeters  auto-improved performance of Gatsby sites using lodash (who knew shedding 60kb could be so simple?).

Lennart Jörgens took typography.js out of the blog starter.

Peter van der Zee added a benchmark for text and csv.

Matt Kane cleaned up some bugs affecting hot reloading.

Michal Piechowiak made the gatsby-remark-copy-linked-files plugin play nicely with assetPrefix.

New from the Gatsby Team

Sid Chatterjee is writing a new book – “Web Development for Everyone”. Register for free to receive a few chapters.

Alex Moon spoke about how to build serverless GraphQL webapps at the GraphQL In Space Conference.

New from the Gatsby Community

ButcherBox, the free range organic meats subscription company, sped up their ecommerce website by 600% (!) by moving off of WordPress and adopting a Gatsby stack that includes Contentful and Netlify.

Wes Bos launched his long awaited Gatsby course. Join over 3,656 others and learn the ins and outs of building an online store with Gatsby.

Also, thank you, Wes also fixed a bug where double backslashes would break develop on Windows . (Building a Gatsby course isn’t enough for Wes, he fixes bugs in core too!)

Jess Watson, the CEO of Points North Media wrote an article on Gatsby Voices about navigating her company through a global pandemic and the protests following the death of George Floyd, all while being underestimated as a female Black founder.

Also on Gatsby Voices, Will Johnson told his story of transitioning into a technology career, while being over 30, married man with kids.

(By the way – Gatsby would love to help tell your story and inspire the next wave of people in Web Development. Learn more here.)

Ramón Morcillo included a cool hyperspace experience on his Gatsby site, and open-sourced the code so anyone can fork it for themselves.

Scott Wambach built his beautiful portfolio site using Gatsby. Click on his floating head for a surprise!

Kevin Gervias, the co-founder of Statflo spoke at the Twilio Signal Conference about how his company uses Gatsby to build curated shopping pages.

Thank you, Taylor Johnson for cleaning up our Spectrum references.

Thank you, Kathleen McMahon for adding a guide on fonts, both locally hosted and web-hosted (a topic near and dear to our hearts! Kyle Mathews built the typefaces library for self-hosting fonts way back in 2016).

Thank you Adam Schay for  pinning dependencies to avoid installing packages with vulnerabilities

New from the Gatsby Ecosystem

Kentico Kontent launched an exciting new product called “Web Spotlight”. This new tool speeds up the workflow of the Content Editors on your team by enabling them to update content within the context of the website. Learn how to implement Web Spotlight with Gatsby Cloud.

Advanced Custom Fields released version 5.9, which includes a design overhaul and a cavalcade of new features. (You can use ACF with your Gatsby project through a free WPGraphQL extension).

MDX hit 1M downloads / week!

Next from Gatsby

Join us for Hacktoberfest 2020

Read this blog post to see how you can participate with Gatsby this year!

gatsby-image with Better Performance

A refresh of gatsby-image is in alpha, but we already see promising results with performance scores in Lighthouse! Visit our repo to see the comparison Lighthouse scores, and learn how to install it on your test projects.

Static Image Component

We have a proof-of-concept for a new static image component that allows you to get all the benefits of automatic resizing, lazy loading from Sharp and gatsby-image — without needing to write GraphQL queries. It is currently available to try as a canary build, and we are looking for feedback on the approach.

Open Roadmap

You can stay up-to-date with Gatsby by peeking at our roadmap.

Talk to our team of Gatsby Experts to supercharge your website performance.