Jekyll, to Gatsby, to Jekyll

Originally I had used Jekyll to create my personal website. I wasn’t acquainted with Ruby at the time, and still, it was simple to learn and manage. Eventually I discovered Gatsby. Gatsby fills a similar purpose. Both are static site generators that make it easy to host a site through GitHub pages. Gatsby is based on Node.js rather than Ruby, and lets you use React and GraphQL. This sounded really good to me at the time since I was familiar with the stack, and it was easy for me to add some code for page transitions and animations, especially with react-spring.

Fast-forward 4 years and my priorities have shifted. I wanted to update my site again, however the maintenance cost was too high. I had an overwhelmingly large amount of packages that needed major version updates, and it was overbearing to look at. This isn’t the type of project I wanted to have for my personal site, so I switched back to Jekyll.

With Jekyll, I don’t have to worry about this. Jekyll doesn’t require many gems to run, whereas Gatsby required multiple packages from all of the plugins. Gatsby would of course have me install the world through node_modules, whereas Jekyll requires very little. The Gemfile.lock is under 200 lines! For a casual project with a low update frequency, this is far more bearable. I will happily sacrifice my beloved TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Et Al for simplicity.

To my surprise, GitHub Pages can also now automatically deploy jekyll sites without us needing to write any CI YAML files ourselves!