After much thought and discussion, the Gatsby team has decided not to hold Virtual Gatsby Days in the way we originally planned. While we were very much looking forward to our first digital community gathering, we feel now is not the time to take attention and space away from the Black Lives Matter movement.
Transforming Gatsby Days from a live event into a content series keeps the focus on more important events while sharing the amazing speakers and learning opportunities in a way the community can access when the time is right for each of us. All of the product and program announcements planned for Gatsby Days have been rolled up into an initial blog post, and now we are following with a video series to present the speakers who had been scheduled to share their knowledge during the event. We hope you enjoy. 💜
We look forward to seeing you at our next Gatsby Days, planned for October, though it’s difficult to say right now exactly what form that will take. Follow Gatsby on Twitter to keep up with announcements around our fall Gatsby Days planning, calls for proposals, when registration starts, and other developments.
Derek Murr, a former graphic designer in Toronto, recently retrained as a front end web developer. As his first full-time gig after graduating from a coding bootcamp, he helped build a new website for Juno College of Technology. In his Gatsby Days presentation Derek discusses how using Gatsby made the sometimes overwhelming universe of web development more approachable for a newly minted web developer. Gatsby provided welcoming documentation, an excellent introduction to GraphQL, and painless deployment. Perhaps more importantly, Gatsby also allowed him to experience tangible progress and concentrate on building rather than configuring tools.
Gatsby’s structure helped Derek focus on concepts and tools like component-driven development and headless CMSes. It also meshed well with his mindset of expanding your knowledge organically by learning whatever is needed to build a project you want to make. Learning is part of the job for any level of developer, and documentation that “meets people where they are and brings them to where they want to be” is crucial. The GraphiQL interface in Gatsby allowed Derek to explore GraphQL without a complicated setup, and the smoothness of deploying Gatsby websites makes it easy to continuously try new things.