From zero to a Gatsby developer

In this online course I am guiding you in building a Gatsby project: a website that tells us about immigration programmes in different countries. This inspiration came from works of Pieter Levels, who is an active supporter of bootstrapping and digital nomading. In particular this project carries resemblance to Nomad List, yet focuses on a different business problem: providing information on how people can migrate to a particular country.

We are going to use key features of React as well as some additional libraries and tools to ensure the website looks good and works well. We will learn how to use Google’s Material UI library for creating pretty ui elements, and we will use the Styled Elements library to style them. We will also cover how to implement a free chatbot on our website for quicker customer feedback. At the end of the course, you will have a functioning website you can add to your portfolio, or one that you can use as a template for an actual business project.

Whether you are familiar with React or now yet, it is a hugely popular framework that is used for serverless front-end development (or can be used with a server as well). Even though React is fantastic, if you would like to create something like a traditional website using it, you would need to work on a server side separately as well to allow search engines to crawl it and to essentially do SEO. Gatsby, however, is a solution. This library creates a static website using react and sets up everything you need for good SEO practice. It does free you from the need of using React and something additional for the back-end (server side).

One of the drawbacks of learning a new technology is how much time it takes to familiarise yourself with it well. Luckily, Gatsby.js runs on a popular tech, so it is likely you won’t need to learn everything from scratch, or at least the new knowledge will be well-transferable in the future. Gatsby uses React and GraphQL, which are wildly popular. Also, Gatsby has great official documentation, as well as a collection of tutorials, templates, and other useful materials.

Another benefit of GatsbyJS is the easy set up. Setting up new projects is very fast, much faster than in many other libraries and frameworks. With a selection of pre-configured projects, you will be able to get to the website development right away. It certainly feels great to start right away and avoid all the usual setup and configuration problems. And if you feel stuck, Gatsby has a great community eager to help.