When Tom Brady announced earlier today that he once again was retiring from the National Football League, I thought I’d experienced my day’s quota of “Well-that-was-unexpected” moments.
Then, hours later, I was surprised anew: this time, it was because Netlify was acquiring Gatsby, Inc., the company behind the Gatsby static site generator (SSG).
Long-time readers here will remember Gatsby once briefly ran this site, albeit only after I’d struggled with it multiple times. Gatsby, based on the React library and designed for heavy use of GraphQL, was hot stuff back then, but always suffered from slow site builds. As faster competitors have either emerged or improved since then, Gatsby hasn’t aged well by comparison, and the market has spoken:
- “Web frameworks and technologies” section of Stack Overflow’s 2022 Developer Survey.
- “Web frameworks” section of the Jamstack Community Survey 2022.
Also: Richard MacManus’s article about the acquisition characterized Gatsby as “struggling,” although this likely was a reference more to the company (and its Gatsby Cloud hosting product, a direct competitor to Netlify and other such Jamstack hosts) than to the SSG itself. Anyway, it’s an interesting take and I urge you to give it a look.
It’s been clear for some time that Gatsby as a platform had been surpassed by Next.js, Astro, and SvelteKit among others; but, still, I’ll be curious to see which Gatsby code and other offerings will now make their way into those of Netlify.