Heading Gatsby's Learning Experience and Bridging Gaps with Marcy Sutton

Marcy Sutton is the Head of Learning at GatsbyJS, but what does that mean? One of Gatsby's core focuses is the community, and a part of that is making the experience with Gatsby as friendly as possible. A large part of making Gatsby friendly is having excellent documentation, so that learning and debugging experiences would be smooth.

So the learning experience is smooth but what is Gatsby's potential on the web? Marcy talks about how Gatsby has the potential to make a huge impact. Currently WordPress is powering about a third of the web, that's huge, but it has its issues. WordPress is centered around the authoring experience but the front-end experience is not good. Gatsby is looking more towards the future, it doesn't use a database, it can build out static HTML, it's accessible, and it's also democratizing the experience with a themes ecosystem.

This brings up the point that JavaScript is eating the web and it's making it more difficult for folks who've had a different intro to webdev. This is a real challenge and people are having their careers impacted, what can we do to reconcile this? The decisions made by tech teams aren't considering this when the pick the technologies that they use, they're picking tech that's going to deliver a high preformance application, where does HTML and CSS fit into this? Marcy discusses how we can bridge the gap and find ways to include people with different skill sets.

Marcy also discusses the inclusive community that she has helped build, NW Tech Women, a small group out of Bellingham WA that hosts social events, but also volunteers and pairs with non-profits to make a community impact.

Transcript

"Heading Gatsby's Learning Experience and Bridging Gaps - with Marcy Sutton" Transcript

Resources:

• NW Tech Women Twitter
• Black Girls Code
• GatsbyJS

Marcy Sutton:

• Twitter
• Website
• GitHub

Joel Hooks

• Twitter
• Website