“What is this beautiful new blog” you ask?

Front-end tech is not my wheelhouse, I like APIs, server-side, distributed systems, and infrastructure. I already had a passing familiarity with core front-end tech, but as a consultant I need to be able to talk to my colleagues that do know front-end tech and talk to my clients about it. There’s been some excitement around Gatsby in the office lately, so I said to myself…

“What better way to figure out this whole front-end thing than by building a blog with Gatsby?”

Of course I didn’t want to put myself off before I started, so I graciously stole the wonderful GatsbyJS Hero Blog starter from Greg Lobinski (source on github). I’ve been altering it to suit my tastes and needs and will continue to do so. Using it as a learning platform if you will.

Special thanks to Greg for putting together such a nice starter and making it available to people like me!

So far I’ve had to learn more than I already knew about;

• Gatsby (obviously!)
• CSS
• React
• CSS and CSS modules
• Node modules
• PrismJS
• …and more

There’s a few small things I still have to do that I’ve been putting off (like the favicon and social links). But there’s a couple of larger features I want to add that will be great learning experiences, including;

• Tags - Greg’s original starter has support for a single Category, but I want to be able to define multiple tags on my posts.
• Comment - The original starter has comment integration using Facebook, I’ve removed the Facebook integration and intend to add back a comment system that’s, well, not Facebook.

I’ll get to them one day I promise!

And more content! Always more content!