Hear from Kyle Mathews, CEO of Gatsby, on the state of website building and why the future is the cloud.

1. The Future is the Cloud
Kyle Mathews, Gatsby

2. What is the state of
website building?

3. ● $$$ hosting
● Security problems
● High maintenance costs e.g. frequent security updates
● Frontend technology is way behind
● Difficulty hiring people with experience
● Websites are slow without a lot of care
Monolithic CMSs

4. ● There are sites you want to build that you can’t
● Sites you build aren’t as good as they could be
● Sites costs too much money
● Difficult to become a web developer as you have to
learn soooo many technologies
This is terrible :-(

5. A very short history of
computing

6. 1940s
Programmable
circuits

7. 1960s
Mainframes

8. 1980s
Personal
computers

9. 2000s
Smartphones

10. 2000s
Software as a
Service (SaaS)

11. 2000s
Cloud
Computing

12. 2000s
S3 - infinite
Hard drive

13. 2010s
Lambda -
compute on
demand

14. Computing becoming like
electricity — plug in
application to compute
and it runs

15. The nature of software is
changing to adapt to
Cloud computing
primitives

16. “Cloud Native software”

17. Definition from the Cloud
Native Foundation
founded by Google, AWS,
Microsoft, etc.

18. “Cloud native technologies empower
organizations to build and run scalable
applications in modern, dynamic
environments such as public, private,
and hybrid clouds. Containers, service
meshes, microservices, immutable
infrastructure, and declarative APIs
exemplify this approach.”

19. “These techniques enable loosely
coupled systems that are resilient,
manageable, and observable. Combined
with robust automation, they allow
engineers to make high-impact changes
frequently and predictably with minimal
toil.”

20. Important question! What would
a “cloud-native web framework”
look like?
And is Gatsby one??

21. Scalable: A Gatsby site can
serve dozens or millions of
visitors with no changes

22. Loosely Coupled:
Gatsby can pull from
any number of
specialized content
systems (content mesh)

23. Resilient
With Gatsby:
● Can quickly rollback broken releases
● Blazing fast even when network is
poor
● Secure as has no running server
software

24. Productive
Gatsby lets engineers & designers make
frequent high-impact changes due to:
● Automatic continuous deployment
● High quality testing tools
● Great development environment
● React/GraphQL

25. Gatsby is a cloud-native web
framework

26. Gatsby, along with content
stores, CDNs, and other cloud
services form a complete cloud-
native website system (CNWS?
:-P)

27. Many other efforts in this space

29. People love using Gatsby

30. We hear people telling us their
teams can build sites twice as
fast with Gatsby as with other
systems.

31. And of course they’re all blazing
fast

32. Over the next 5-10 years, the
vast majority of web sites/apps
will migrate to a cloud-native
web framework like Gatsby

33. We want to enable everyone to
be able to switch to Gatsby
from traditional web stacks
whether that's Rails, WordPress,
Drupal, Express, etc.

34. How are we doing on
building the future?

35. State of Gatsby
● 1941 contributors
● 833 plugins
● 10s of thousands of production
websites
● 0.7% of top 10k, 0.1% of top million
● ~15k monthly active users
● ~950k downloads / month
● Averaging ~100 merged PRs / week
● 34.4k GitHub stars

41. Gatsby Inc.
● 6 full-time and 3 part-time core
maintainers
● 3 full-time on themes and related
tooling
● 2 full-time designers
● 2 full-time devrels who focus on
teaching people how to use Gatsby

42. We're investing heavily in
building the best presentation
layer for cloud-native websites

43. Gatsby Preview
Our first offering as part of Gatsby Cloud

44. Preview is a revolutionary feature
Content editors finally have a really
amazing experience in the world of
cloud-native web sites.

45. In closed beta but launching VERY
SOON

46. Initially supporting Contentful.
Happy to announce that we finished
adding support for Sanity.io last week!

47. Will be rapidly adding support for other
CMSs
Third & Grove (sponsor) is working on
Drupal module to let Drupal work on
Gatsby Preview

48. DEMO

49. assetPrefix
Host assets separately from HTML — support legacy website
hosting setups

51. GraphQL Schema tooling
Low-level control over your GraphQL schema

52. https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2019-03-18-releasing-new-schema-customization/

54. Themes
Enables composable websites: like React components but for
entire sections of your website.

55. Chris Biscardi talking next about themes
but here’s the short pitch:
Imagine if you could take a section of
your Gatsby site, put it into a NPM
package, and reuse it on any website
you build?

56. Imagine also there are 1000s of themes
available for adding blogs, docs, an
ecommerce store, event pages, etc. into
your site.
Use open source or paid themes or you
can easily build your own.

57. Like WordPress themes but waaaay nicer
and more powerful

58. Design Systems
css-in-js/theme-ui/designql/typography.js/styled-systems/etc

59. How can we make themes truly
reusable?
For a blog theme to fit in well with the
rest of your site — must respect your
color, typography, spacing choices.

60. Check out these projects as well as chat
with Brent Jackson who is here — he's
been thinking and innovating in this
space for a long time
We're super excited that he joined the
team earlier this year along with John
Otander, his long-time collaborator

61. Links:
● https://github.com/system-ui/theme-
ui
● https://github.com/styled-
system/styled-system
● https://github.com/KyleAMathews/ty
pography.js
● https://github.com/system-
ui/designql

62. MDX
Markdown for the component era

63. MDX is an authorable format that lets you
seamlessly write JSX in your Markdown
documents. You can import components,
such as interactive charts or alerts, and
embed them within your content. This
makes writing long-form content with
components a blast.

64. John Otander, inventor of MDX, joined
team in January (couldn’t make it to this
Gatsby Day)

65. Blocks
Editor for MDX

66. Working on an open-source MDX-native
editor that'll let you edit markdown &
React components in a WYSIWYG editor
— alpha quality still but please come play
https://github.com/blocks/blocks

67. Incremental builds
Scale Gatsby to very very large sites

68. This is a hard problem
The “holy grail of static sites”
And we're feeling really confident we've
cracked it.

69. Incremental builds will be part of a
hosted Gatsby Build service we’re adding
to Gatsby Cloud and will be launching in
the coming months

70. It's going to be amazing
Will rebuild sites with 1 million+ pages in
< 30 seconds
100 pages in < 5 seconds

71. Eventually we'll get this down to sub-
second but you gotta launch with
something :-D

72. This changes things
A ton of sites can't use Gatsby (and other
SSGs) as build times take too long.
Incremental builds will make builds
disappear.

73. Gatsby Builds will have full integration
with a variety of hosting platforms like
Netlify, AWS, Google Firebase, etc.

74. The future is Cloud-y
Come live in the future and build your
sites on Gatsby

75. That’s all, folks! ✌
Kyle Mathews
@kylemathews
github.com/kyleamathews