5 ms·

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs -

by swyx 2y ago

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs - being the default docs tool for React, and building a massive ecosystem of integrations you could install out of the box. But too many abstractions, divided goals between cloud and OSS, and the better stewardship/design of Nextjs brought it down. There were the simple lessons (https://swyx.io/a-world-without-plugins-cig https://swyx.io/a-world-without-plugins-cig). its easy to say in hindsight that graphql was too much for gatsby. i also believe the company went too hard for number of integrations over quality of them, an issue I had even in my interview. this was a poorer expression of the better insight that seb markbage had; just have a small api surface area bro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anAwXYqLG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anAwXYqLG8) But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. the fact that vercel is pretty much the only successful frontend startup of its generation makes it an exception to the rule (there are plenty of smaller companies that are thriving, like tailwind, but it is not a venture scale startup and thats fine). People dont pay for frontend tooling. they expect it to be free, expect it to do everything, get into internicine squabbles between frameworks when they are all basically doomed compared to just betting on React sponsored by Facebook and now Vercel (and a little bit of Shopify), or going back to fullstack frameworks like Django/Rails/Laravel. all frontend tooling, nextjs included, is just leadgen, loss leaders, while investors/salespeople patiently wait until you "grow up" by... building cloud backend/ci/cd services. 5 years ago i wrote about the "frontend ceiling" for individual developer careers (https://x.com/swyx/status/1682748872047886337 https://x.com/swyx/status/1682748872047886337) - i fear this is the "frontend ceiling" for companies. I deeply admire Astro and hope they figure out a way to break the ceiling. Their recent cloud products have been encouraging.

epolanski 2y ago
Graphql was what made me hate Gatsby to be honest. I think Typescript's websites uses it (or used to), and I wanted to fix a bug in the website and holy hell if Gatsby made me dislike the experience..
- andrewingram 2y ago
  Even as a massive GraphQL fan, the GraphQL layer is what made me migrate all my projects away from Gatsby. It just doesn’t portray it at its best.
  - swyx 2y ago
    (just saying hey andrew! love to see you are still on the graphql train)
jwngr 2y ago
Astro is what I wanted and thought Gatsby would be. GraphQL was the wrong sized abstraction for a basic blog site like mine. And once Gatsby turned towards the cloud (which made sense as a business), everything just got so complicated. I was swept up by it too. Cool insight on frontend ceilings -- deployment is king.
mmckelvy 2y ago
My bet is on Remix (which will eventually just be React Router). I think it's just the right amount of abstraction over native web functionality with a nice, simple API that doesn't deviate too much from web standards. I also think the full stack approach just makes sense for developing on the web.
- swyx 2y ago
  > which will eventually just be React Router how strongly do you believe this. because ive just read both docs and i think they have different goals/audiences (tho obviously same owner). i think react router will be a poorer project if it starts to require serverside components like it is looking
  - mmckelvy 2y ago
    They made an announcement that they are merging the projects a little while back: https://remix.run/blog/merging-remix-and-react-router https://remix.run/blog/merging-remix-and-react-router. Obviously things could change, but I think RR v7 will effectively be the next iteration of Remix.
    - swyx 2y ago
      ah yeah. they didnt quite address my concerns in that post. but they know better than i.
- mind-blight 2y ago
  I'm a huge remix fan. Remix, Shadcn, postgres, and Prisma have been great for rapid development
  - mmckelvy 2y ago
    Agreed, minus the Primsa.
    - mind-blight 2y ago
vladgur 2y ago
I am for one surprised that the initial concept of Gatsby -- a static site generator with React, GraphQL and other hype words of late 2010s -- was actually able to raise $40+ million dollars to build a platform for what to me at the time seemed incredibly over-engineered stack for static html pages and an unproven founder. It was truly a testament of times
- swyx 2y ago
  we do live in a society
- CSSer 2y ago
  RIP ZIRP. Kyle was cool and had the right attitude about a lot of things. He built some great frontend tooling e.g. fontsource, without locking it into his larger projects like Vercel did. That was very altruistic. Regardless, yeah, I couldn’t believe it when Gatsby got its seed round. It was a wild time.
  - ayuhito 2y ago
    Kyle is a great guy. Just to correct the timeline a little bit, I only created Fontsource after its predecessor, Typefaces (which was made by Kyle), was left abandoned when Gatsby took off. I wouldn’t say he made Typefaces specifically for the Gatsby ecosystem, but he definitely had the hacker mindset for creating frontend tooling for a while.
    - CSSer 2y ago
      Thank you for that correction! I had to google to find the name because I was fuzzy on it. Your last paragraph matches my recall. The point I was trying to make was that I appreciated that Typefaces wasn’t automatically part of Gatsby just because of Kyle’s affiliation.
com2kid 2y ago
> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot. During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Basic helped Microsoft take over the world. Go back another generation and Borland's Delphi dominated for years. And, arguably, all of those systems were more productive than anything we have now. (A topic I've written about many times!) As an industry, we may indeed be getting exactly what we pay for.
- swyx 2y ago
  yes good point. ofc Unity/Unreal Engine today also makes great money. i think those frontends you mention made money because they had defacto monopoly on a certain platform or kind of experience that was unavailable anywhere else. xcode is a piece of absolute crap but i still have to pay $100 a year or whatever for it. perhaps the emergence of web standards - both JS and browser standards - killed frontend. when everyone can build their own tools that run everywhere, and the browser api's are often pretty good, then why buy instead of build, or pick the next one that is free and good enough.
  - com2kid 2y ago
    > xcode is a piece of absolute crap but i still have to pay $100 a year or whatever for it. You say xcode is horrible, but have you tried opening a project in Android Studio after 6 months and getting it to compile again? It was funny, when I was at Microsoft, almost no one used Visual Studio because it wasn't able to handle code on the scale of MS's code bases. (I think things may be different now). That and it didn't support unusual build scenarios (which now it does.) I wonder if it is the same case at Apple with xcode. Do OS engineers on MacOS actually use xcode to developer MacOS?
- MikeTheGreat 2y ago
  > Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft Huh. It always kinda seemed like a "Microsoft's version of <...>, because Microsoft always has to compete with everything, including <...>". In this case, <...> is "Adobe Flash" I'm curious if people have examples of what it was used for? Looking at the Wikipedia page [1] which says "According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.2% in May 2011. Usage on July 2010 was 53.6%, whereas as of May 2011 market leader Adobe Flash was installed on 95.3% of browsers, and Java was supported on 76.5% of browsers.[10]" That shocked me - what was this used for, anyways? Wikipedia goes on to say "Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing,[11] the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver,[12] and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties.[13] Silverlight was also used by Amazon Video and Netflix for their instant video streaming services" If Silverlight was being used for Netflix I can see it being installed on 60%+ of browsers just from that. Still, I'm curious - anybody have have examples of what else it was used for? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight
dartos 2y ago
I think frontend tooling is valuable, but there’s so much good free out there that it’s hard to monetize. Gatsby always seemed wildly overengineered to me. It’s like all the bad parts of react, with all the bad parts of complicated js tooling, and none of the upsides. Never made sense.
madeofpalk 2y ago
Is Vercel a frontend tooling startup? I've always seen them as a AWS-wrapping hosting company, who funds some react projects on the side and will drop them at a moment's notice. Netlify, who bought Gatsby on its decline, still seems to be going alright without being a frontend tooling company.
- swyx 2y ago
  > etlify, who bought Gatsby on its decline, still seems to be going alright without being a frontend tooling company. what makes you so sure :/
kelnos 2y ago
> Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. Is any tooling worth that much, really? I think the key is that backend tooling lends itself to selling hosted solutions, while frontend tooling is usually stuff you run locally or on CI to build artifacts. Sure, there are exceptions, but most people don't pay for developer-focused software anymore, at least not directly.
- theflyinghorse 2y ago
  Sure. There are several companies selling paid JVMs and corpos gladly pay them a lot of money.
victorhooi 2y ago
I'm probably a bit out of the loop her - but you referenced Gatsby's collapse? Did something happen to them, in the community or project? Googling, I saw that they were acquired by Netlify in early 2023 - but not much concrete beyond that?

by swyx 2y ago

epolanski 2y ago

Graphql was what made me hate Gatsby to be honest. I think Typescript's websites uses it (or used to), and I wanted to fix a bug in the website and holy hell if Gatsby made me dislike the experience..

andrewingram 2y ago
Even as a massive GraphQL fan, the GraphQL layer is what made me migrate all my projects away from Gatsby. It just doesn’t portray it at its best.
- swyx 2y ago
  (just saying hey andrew! love to see you are still on the graphql train)

jwngr 2y ago

Astro is what I wanted and thought Gatsby would be. GraphQL was the wrong sized abstraction for a basic blog site like mine. And once Gatsby turned towards the cloud (which made sense as a business), everything just got so complicated. I was swept up by it too. Cool insight on frontend ceilings -- deployment is king.

mmckelvy 2y ago

My bet is on Remix (which will eventually just be React Router). I think it's just the right amount of abstraction over native web functionality with a nice, simple API that doesn't deviate too much from web standards. I also think the full stack approach just makes sense for developing on the web.

swyx 2y ago
> which will eventually just be React Router how strongly do you believe this. because ive just read both docs and i think they have different goals/audiences (tho obviously same owner). i think react router will be a poorer project if it starts to require serverside components like it is looking
- mmckelvy 2y ago
  They made an announcement that they are merging the projects a little while back: https://remix.run/blog/merging-remix-and-react-router https://remix.run/blog/merging-remix-and-react-router. Obviously things could change, but I think RR v7 will effectively be the next iteration of Remix.
  - swyx 2y ago
    ah yeah. they didnt quite address my concerns in that post. but they know better than i.
mind-blight 2y ago
I'm a huge remix fan. Remix, Shadcn, postgres, and Prisma have been great for rapid development
- mmckelvy 2y ago
  Agreed, minus the Primsa.
  - mind-blight 2y ago

vladgur 2y ago

I am for one surprised that the initial concept of Gatsby -- a static site generator with React, GraphQL and other hype words of late 2010s -- was actually able to raise $40+ million dollars to build a platform for what to me at the time seemed incredibly over-engineered stack for static html pages and an unproven founder. It was truly a testament of times

swyx 2y ago
we do live in a society
CSSer 2y ago
RIP ZIRP. Kyle was cool and had the right attitude about a lot of things. He built some great frontend tooling e.g. fontsource, without locking it into his larger projects like Vercel did. That was very altruistic. Regardless, yeah, I couldn’t believe it when Gatsby got its seed round. It was a wild time.
- ayuhito 2y ago
  Kyle is a great guy. Just to correct the timeline a little bit, I only created Fontsource after its predecessor, Typefaces (which was made by Kyle), was left abandoned when Gatsby took off. I wouldn’t say he made Typefaces specifically for the Gatsby ecosystem, but he definitely had the hacker mindset for creating frontend tooling for a while.
  - CSSer 2y ago
    Thank you for that correction! I had to google to find the name because I was fuzzy on it. Your last paragraph matches my recall. The point I was trying to make was that I appreciated that Typefaces wasn’t automatically part of Gatsby just because of Kyle’s affiliation.

com2kid 2y ago

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot. During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Basic helped Microsoft take over the world. Go back another generation and Borland's Delphi dominated for years. And, arguably, all of those systems were more productive than anything we have now. (A topic I've written about many times!) As an industry, we may indeed be getting exactly what we pay for.

swyx 2y ago
yes good point. ofc Unity/Unreal Engine today also makes great money. i think those frontends you mention made money because they had defacto monopoly on a certain platform or kind of experience that was unavailable anywhere else. xcode is a piece of absolute crap but i still have to pay $100 a year or whatever for it. perhaps the emergence of web standards - both JS and browser standards - killed frontend. when everyone can build their own tools that run everywhere, and the browser api's are often pretty good, then why buy instead of build, or pick the next one that is free and good enough.
- com2kid 2y ago
  > xcode is a piece of absolute crap but i still have to pay $100 a year or whatever for it. You say xcode is horrible, but have you tried opening a project in Android Studio after 6 months and getting it to compile again? It was funny, when I was at Microsoft, almost no one used Visual Studio because it wasn't able to handle code on the scale of MS's code bases. (I think things may be different now). That and it didn't support unusual build scenarios (which now it does.) I wonder if it is the same case at Apple with xcode. Do OS engineers on MacOS actually use xcode to developer MacOS?
MikeTheGreat 2y ago
> Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft Huh. It always kinda seemed like a "Microsoft's version of <...>, because Microsoft always has to compete with everything, including <...>". In this case, <...> is "Adobe Flash" I'm curious if people have examples of what it was used for? Looking at the Wikipedia page [1] which says "According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.2% in May 2011. Usage on July 2010 was 53.6%, whereas as of May 2011 market leader Adobe Flash was installed on 95.3% of browsers, and Java was supported on 76.5% of browsers.[10]" That shocked me - what was this used for, anyways? Wikipedia goes on to say "Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing,[11] the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver,[12] and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties.[13] Silverlight was also used by Amazon Video and Netflix for their instant video streaming services" If Silverlight was being used for Netflix I can see it being installed on 60%+ of browsers just from that. Still, I'm curious - anybody have have examples of what else it was used for? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

dartos 2y ago

I think frontend tooling is valuable, but there’s so much good free out there that it’s hard to monetize. Gatsby always seemed wildly overengineered to me. It’s like all the bad parts of react, with all the bad parts of complicated js tooling, and none of the upsides. Never made sense.

madeofpalk 2y ago

Is Vercel a frontend tooling startup? I've always seen them as a AWS-wrapping hosting company, who funds some react projects on the side and will drop them at a moment's notice. Netlify, who bought Gatsby on its decline, still seems to be going alright without being a frontend tooling company.

swyx 2y ago
> etlify, who bought Gatsby on its decline, still seems to be going alright without being a frontend tooling company. what makes you so sure :/

kelnos 2y ago

> Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. Is any tooling worth that much, really? I think the key is that backend tooling lends itself to selling hosted solutions, while frontend tooling is usually stuff you run locally or on CI to build artifacts. Sure, there are exceptions, but most people don't pay for developer-focused software anymore, at least not directly.

theflyinghorse 2y ago
Sure. There are several companies selling paid JVMs and corpos gladly pay them a lot of money.

victorhooi 2y ago

I'm probably a bit out of the loop her - but you referenced Gatsby's collapse? Did something happen to them, in the community or project? Googling, I saw that they were acquired by Netlify in early 2023 - but not much concrete beyond that?