Lullabot is a strategy, UX design, and development agency based internationally. They’ve worked with clients like Syfy, the NYU School of Medicine, and WWE and recently interviewed Gatsby’s founder, Kyle Mathews, on the Lullabot podcast to discuss…what else? Gatsby!
On this podcast episode, Kyle walks through what problems he was trying to solve when starting Gatsby and the steps developers take to get Gatsby up and running. Here’s a few tidbits from the interview:
How Gatsby works
“Gatsby does what we call code splitting, as it takes all the different code from different pages in your site and splits it into little bundles. When you load the site, it’s only loading the JavaScript necessary for the portion of the site that you are on. And as you navigate around, Gatsby lazy loads different parts of the application so that the website stays super fast.”
“It should feel like you’re building a React app, but it produces a very fast website. You have the really nice development experience that you get when building a React app, but what it spits out is every bit a website.”
What problems were you trying to solve with Gatsby?
“I’ve always been interested in—what makes websites fast? It was an interesting design challenge: can you make performance first class as a part of a framework? It’s not that your website can be fast, but Gatsby flips it on its head—your site can be slow if you mess it up sufficiently bad—but under normal conditions, it should by default be super fast. That’s the goal.”
Kyle also discusses the history of Gatsby and his journey: how and why did Gatsby come about? Listen to the podcast to hear about the best use cases for Gatsby, how to get started, and what you can expect when using it.