E4 | A Conversation about Gatsby and Static Site Generators | Nikan Shahidi

Headless { Creator Podcast }

My special guest is Nikan Shahidi, the founder of Webstacks, a digital agency who specializes in various web technologies including Contentful and Gatsby.js. In this episode, Nikan and Marcelo chat all about Static Site Generators (SSGs) and more specifically, dig into the details of Gatsby.js

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Questions Asked

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• Tell us about your background.
  
• What language did you first code in?
  
• Tell us about your firm, WebStacks.
  
• Are you guys Certified Contentful Professionals?
  
• What are SSGs?
  
• Are SSGs dynamically generated on request or pre-generated during build time?
  
• Explain the 3 different delivery architectures Contentful recommends.
  
• What are the positives and negatives dynamic on server and dynamic on client architectures?
  
• What are some drawbacks to having an SSG site?
  
• How do SSG sites handle personalization?
  
• What about having a dynamic on client and SSG hybrid site?
  
• What other SSG exists today?
  
• Is VUE is considered an SSG framework?
  
• What do developers need to know to start creating with Gatsby JS?
  
• Where can you host an SSG site?
  
• Explain the workflow from content creation to content publishing using an SSG site.
  
• Explain webhooks and how they work with Netlify.
  
• How is GitHub used with SSGs?
  
• Can you use Contentful UI Extensions to trigger builds?
  
• Can you use Zappier to trigger builds?
  
• What if users need to publish constantly, are SSGs still the right way to go?
  
• Explain the relationship between GraphQL and Gatsby?
  
• Explain how templates work in GatsbyJS.
  
• What are source plug-ins?
  
• What are transformer plug-ins?
  
• Is there a marketplace for these types of plug-ins?
  

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Reference Links

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• Webstacks (https://www.webstacks.com/)
  
• GatsbyJS (https://www.gatsbyjs.org/)
  
• Contentful Resource Center (https://www.contentful.com/resources/)
  
• GraphQL (https://graphql.org/)
  
• VueJS (https://vuejs.org/)
  
• ReactJS (https://reactjs.org/)