We’re less than a week away from GatsbyConf 2022, and we thought it would be a good time to touch base with Gatsby Co-Founder and CTO Kyle Mathews (@KyleMathews) and get his perspective on the growth of the Gatsby community (and company) over the years, what we can expect to hear and see from his talk at GatsbyConf, and get some of his thoughts on what’s next for Gatsby.
Q. What are you most proud about when you look back at the history of Gatsby?
A. When Gatsby started we had a lot of audacious, ambitious ideas, and we’ve managed to build a community and company that are making those ideas come true. I’m excited and proud about all the things we have made happen, and I’m excited about all the things we have coming.
Q. If you’re speaking with a web developer that has never used Gatsby before, what would you tell them that Gatsby offers that nobody else does, or does better than anyone else?
A. Gatsby is a great solution for developers to build modern, super-fast websites with a great developer experience. Gatsby is a great framework for building modern CMS-style websites — if you need a tool that empowers both developers and marketers to do their jobs, then choose Gatsby.
Q. Speaking of marketers, what advantages does Gatsby bring to the table for them?
A. Gatsby provides choices that will help make everyone happy: developers have more freedom and flexibility while giving content editors and marketers more freedom as well. Gatsby is a choice that will make everyone happy — developers will be happy, marketers will be happy with the fast websites developers create, and both developers and marketers will be empowered moving forward.
Q. You have a talk at GatsbyConf that discusses how Gatsby builds faster on Gatsby Cloud vs other platforms. Without giving too much away from your talk, what are some of those advantages?
A. If you ever wondered how Gatsby works on Gatsby Cloud and why it works so much faster, I’m going to dig into Gatsby’s architecture and how that’s enabled on Gatsby Cloud. We’ve made some huge improvements with regards to build times that will make them even faster. I’ll share more details on that in my GatsbyConf talk.
Q. Do you have any tips for developers trying to speed up local build times?
A. We’ve written some great guidelines on how to improve build performance that would be worth studying – it has some useful best practices and more advanced techniques that can help drastically improve build performance.
Q. Any final thoughts about Gatsby or GatsbyConf you’d like to share?
A. I’m excited to see big parts of our initial vision for Gatsby coming together, and I’m excited to talk at GatsbyConf about how Gatsby’s architecture enables really important features like preview.
Q. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us!
A. You’re welcome. See everyone at GatsbyConf!
Register for GatsbyConf and attend Kyle’s talk – at 3:00 pm MT on Thursday, March 3rd – to learn how Gatsby has managed to make Gatsby build so much faster on Gatsby Cloud than on other hosting platforms. In Kyle’s talk he’ll preview some of the upcoming changes and improvements the Gatsby engineering team has been working on to make build and publish times even faster when running Gatsby sites on Gatsby Cloud.