Ash Katnoria

I use Gatsby because:

When starting out to build my website, I had clear requirements:

• Should be able to write posts only in markdown.
• Should be able to create interactive posts with widgets and D3/Vega visualisation.
• Should be able to pull data from backend web-services.
• Easy to manage and deploy

Gatsby ticked most except that it had higher learning curve especially when I wanted to add custom React components inside markdown (i.e Vega plots) or handle both Markdown and Javascript posts. It takes time if you want to do more than what is covered in their tutorials but I feel its worth it.

And, with MDX plugin that I am yet to try I see things getting even more cooler (i.e mixing JSX and Markdown).

I use Netlify because it plugs in so nicely with Gatsby. The ease of deployment was never so easy. All I need to do is follow the install steps on their website and boom they pull your from github, build a docker image and deploy it for you. you can monitor this process on their dashboard (super nice).

Next time, just check-in your code to github and Netlify will do automated build and deployment for you.

I use React because of ease of use and clean API. Most times, I want to add widgets to my main website or build a single page webapp to provide an interface my machine learning models. React and its ecosystem of libraries make it easy for me to pick and choose and really build a Webapp that looks good with default settings/css.