The 2020 version of davidosomething.com is built on GatsbyJS. At the time of this writing I am working for Squarespace, a company that provides a website builder and CMS as one of its services, so you might wonder why I am not hosting my blog on that platform. The reason is to branch out my knowledge of the website creation field, both for work research and as an exercise.

Changes since the site’s last iteration

Since the 2016 version, I’ve removed commenting from this site. There’s other ways to share a post and leave notes (including just tweeting me), so I’ve opted not to include it.

The changelog output has not made its way back in, but I will probably re-introduce it later.

Thoughts on the tech stack

The tech stack I’m using is the GatsbyJS build system and framework, React, CSS Modules, typography.js, and GraphQL.

Of those, the one I’d previously never used and I’ve have come to like is CSS Modules. There are some flaws with the @values system, but it’s a nice break from using SASS in personal projects and LESS at work.

I was introduced to typography.js since I started this blog using gatsby-starter-blog. It provides some nice handling of defaults, but it is not possible to combine with other frameworks (i.e., you can’t really import rhythym and scale into your CSS Modules are functions AFAIK).

The GraphQL integration into the GatsbyJS framework has been amazing. I’m using it to query static JSON and all my old markdown files from this blog. It’s so much nicer than the configuration based system that Metalsmith had.

GatsbyJS itself has been very nice. I think the biggest barrier to entry (provided you already know the other parts of the stack) is figuring out which gatsby-*.js file to edit and what they do. I’ve also run into some caching issues during hot reload development, so I typically start with a gatsby clean every time I start a coding session.