This course has been updated! We now recommend you take the Introduction to Gatsby, v2 course.
Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Jason Lengstorf: My name is Jason Lengstorf and I work as human duct tape at Gatsby, that means that I do a lot of different things. Everything from dev roll to writing content to writing code. And I used to work as an architect at IBM. I live in Portland, Oregon.
[00:00:16] And so what we're going to learn today, Is a bunch of stuff. But the most exciting thing is we're gonna learn what Gatsby is and why it matters as a platform and as a tool, and why it's useful to us as web developers. We're also gonna dive into the Gatsby fundamentals, kinda the building blocks of what makes a Gatsby site tick and what makes it different from just building a plain React app.
[00:00:37] We'll dive into GraphQL, the fundamentals of GraphQL. We're only gonna use the pieces of it that we need to build in Gatsby. We're not gonna be doing a deep dive into what GraphQL is or the language specifics. We're also gonna get into MDX. MDX is a way to write React components in your markdown.
[00:00:54] That is a really powerful way to write content for developers and so we're gonna look at how to use that. We've also got programmatic page creation which is where you've got data somewhere. You're able to load that data and build pages from it without having to write actual files to house that data.
[00:01:09] Then we're going to get into performance optimization through image optimization and various other strategies that Gatsby either does automatically or enables with relatively low effort. And we're going to load third party data into our Gatsby site. We'll be loading Instagram data and showing recent posts from an account in an interesting component.
[00:01:31] And once we get all that done we're gonna build into play that site to nullify so everything that you build today we'll be live on the Internet by the end of this workshop, which is a pretty fun way to build Web sites.