115: Jason Lengstorf - Gatsby for Skeptics

In this episode of Fullstack Radio, I talked to Jason Langsdorf about Gatsby and how it's more than just a static site generator. This is Fullstack Radio episode 115. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Fullstack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wadden. And today, it's my pleasure to be speaking with Jason Langsdorf of Gatsby. How's it going, Jason? It's going well. Thanks for having me. For anyone who's not familiar with you, do you mind just kinda briefly introducing yourself and talking a little bit about what you do? Sure. So, I am the head of developer relations at Gatsby. I also I often joke that my actual job title is human duct tape because I end up doing kinda all sorts of stuff over there, which is exactly what I wanna be doing. I love a little bit of chaos, and and I feel like early stage startups are just the right kind of chaos for me. So Nice. But, yeah, I work on a lot of community stuff and, you know, docs, demos. I run a weekly livestream, podcast, you know, podcast stuff like this and all sorts of fun things. Cool. That's awesome. Yeah. So the reason I wanna have you on the show today is because, Gatsby as a tool has been sort of taking off over the last, you know, little while and I start I started to see seeing it pop up more and more and all sorts of different places. And I haven't actually had the opportunity to really build anything with it yet. So I thought it would be awesome to sort of, kind of learn more about it and get the perspective, you know, that someone like me needs to sort of get excited about the project that I think a lot of people out there who have heard about it, who've seen people talking about it, but maybe don't have the full story, you know, would like to better understand. So they know where Gatsby might fit into their regular sort of workflows and on the sorts of projects that they work on. So what is sort of like the pitch for Gatsby? I tend to pitch Gatsby as being a shortcut to just start building things. It's similar to create react app in that you run one command and there's a whole site up and running. But in addition to what create react app gives you, Gatsby is also gonna come with a routing solution, a server side server side rendering solution, a plug in ecosystem that allows you to pull data from anywhere, manipulate that data, and kinda use it in whatever combination you want. And then what we produce what we do a static asset build, which means that you're able to, take that whole site that you've worked on, comp, compile it down to static assets. And then once it hits the browser, you're able to rehydrate into a React app, meaning …