Part of our mission at Narative is to provide technical excellence through an engineering team that is proud and cohesive. To help accomplish this, we need a team that can share its knowledge, tools, and skills amongst itself and with the community around it.

The beauty of Gatsby

Gatsby allows our team to use the powerful React API when creating page based websites with almost no drawbacks. All the principles and techniques we’ve learned from using React for the last few years can be leveraged with Gatsby. This has enabled us to create a team that is extremely dynamic and cohesive without the worry of creating silos or losing knowledge across teams. Our team is able to learn once, write everywhere. With an engineering team that’s familiar with React and Gatsby we’re able to tackle more problems faster, which is highly beneficial to our partners and the services we offer.

Gatsby has enabled us to create a team that is extremely dynamic and cohesive without the worry of creating silos or lost knowledge across projects.

One concern we had when adopting Gatsby is that page based websites are not the same as web apps. Even though we’re using similar tools to build them there are different principles that drive each type of development. Luckily, our team doesn’t have to worry about that problem, because the team behind Gatsby is focused on delivering the perfect experience to end users for us. The Gatsby team has baked in all the necessary features to make our websites fast and up to standard.

Gatsby’s fast, really fast

Gatsby handles a lot of the complexity of delivering a fast website for you. There are new performance standards built into it; we don’t have to worry about code splitting, service workers / progress web app capabilities, server side rendering, asset optimization, and basic security. To get an idea of the speed visit the official website of Gatsby!

Great performance out-of-the-box is a huge win. Our team does not have to focus on these optimizations anymore. Instead, we focus on telling the story and building the values of our partners into our websites and web apps.

Gatsby does not only allow us to deliver faster websites, but it has also sped up our development time.

Developing with Gatsby is fast, really fast

Gatsby does not only allow us to deliver fast websites, it has also sped up our development time. The developer experience is another focus of the team behind Gatsby — and it shows. Features such as live reload are ready to go at when you start a new project. There’s no need to setup a custom Webpack configuration as the basics are completed for you. Building your website and deploying is also carefully thought out by Gatsby and often requires running a single command and using one of the many integrations for hosting. Furthermore, the documentation is comprehensive and has plenty of content from introductory guides to complex use cases. This has been amazing for training and on boarding new members of our team, especially if they’re already familiar with React.

Separation between view and data layers

Many popular CMS tools are tightly coupled to their source of data. Gatsby offers a clear separation between the data and view layer building on top of the Headless CMS principles. The advantage for Narative is that we can develop without CMS lock-in such as WordPress. If our team decides to go with a new view layer the migration would be less painful than migrating all the data as well. Often times flexibility in software means more complexity to manage but in this case the flexibility is in the right spots where it reduces complexity.

We pass this flexibility on to our partners. They are able to manage their data while our team is able to deliver an excellent product on top of their existing infrastructure. This has made our solutions to revamping legacy projects even stronger than before.

Plugins and integrations

Tools such as WordPress have a strong appeal because of the maturity and vast plugin ecosystem build around it. Gatsby has a well architected plugin-system that has already met our needs at Narative. The plugins are modern, plentiful, and easy to create if needed.