Gatsby was one of the first open-source projects that I’ve contributed to. Their community is super nice and friendly, and their projects are always open for contributions. I helped to maintain Gatsby’s plugins, themes and documentation.
I usually build full-stack web applications using NodeJS and Express for the server and PostgreSQL or MongoDB for the database. After using this stack for awhile, I realized that having a server and database was not always a good thing. The most annoying thing was that servers were expensive and the the website became costly to host. Gatsby provides a framework that supports JAMstack (Javascript, API and Markup stack), which is an approach that has been gaining traction in modern times. Gatsby provides data splitting and pre-build pages out-of-the-box. As a result, Gatsby sites are extremely performant. As a trade-off, the server related functionalities are handled by plugins, so it is not very flexible for dealing with applications that require databases and server-side functionalities.
Going off on a tangent, my team at MLH have recently started contributing to a similar framework called Next.js, which has support for server-side functionalities without using plugins. So it was really cool to contrast their different approaches to facilitating the JAMStack.
Coming back, working at Gatsby also gave me a good idea of how to triage user issues. As Gatsby has many users, there are many issues everyday. Gatsby has a really neat system for triaging issues with priority, and labelling them with the relevant topics. Overall, it was a really cool experience serving as a maintainer of Gatsby, and I would love to contribute more actively whenever I can!
