Hello, this is my first blog post with a new domain and platform. The post is being written in markdown and implemented using Gatsby.

Why Gatsby?

There are a lot of static site generators to choose from. Jekyll, Hugo, Next, and Hexo are some of the big ones, and I've heard of some interesting ones like Eleventy as well. At first, I thought I'd just want something that outputs straight HTML, and that a heavy JavaScript app couldn't possibly be better than simple HTML and CSS.

However, I realized that an SSG like Gatsby utilizes the power of code/data splitting, pre-loading, pre-caching, image optimization, and all sorts of performance enhancements that would be difficult or impossible to do with straight HTML.

Since I primarily write JavaScript these days, I definitely wanted an SSG that runs on Node.js, and if it uses React, even better. I tested out a few sites that run on Gatsby and yeah - they were fast. Blazingly fast.

A few things I really like about Gatsby:

• No page reloads - this site is now a SPA (single page app), and clicking on any internal page from within the website doesn't need to load a completely new resource
• Image optimization - all the images are automatically stripped of metadata, optimized, resized, lazy-loaded, and compressed
• Pre-fetch resources - Gatsby detects what links are available on a given page and loads that data into the cache
• Bundling and minification - code is minified, bundled, and served
• Server side rendered at build time
• Every time I push to the repo, the site gets automatically deployed.

Very little boilerplate code was necessary to get started with Gatsby. I just forked the Gatsby Advanced Starter, a very simple, minimalist, completely UI-free foundation after my own heart, and started working with it.

I should mention I moved my host from Github Pages to Netlify, which is awesome. I really can't say enough about them. I'm highly impressed with how quick and easy it is to set up anything I want.

I hope to start blogging more frequently about study, probably some nerdy stuff, programming-verse and other various interesting things. Thanks for reading this.