Building a personal website using React, Gatsby and Netlify
A collection of thoughts and opinions regarding the experience of creating this website through the use of these technologies.
This site was built using ReactJS, with components from Material UI, Gatsby as a Static Site Generator (SSG) and Netlify to act as a host server, CMS and Continuous Integration / Continuous Development platform.
The initial motivation behind using Gatsby was to reduce hosting costs for this site, as a Static Site Generator the end result of a Gatsby project are simple static webpages, which are typically much cheaper to host when compared to Dynamic Single Page Applications, typical of most React projects, there is also the added benefit of improved site performance as pages are pre-rendered at build time and do not have to be interpreted by the Javascript engine on the users browser.