Gatsby with Contentful... or not.

About this post

Today is a “fail!” post.

It happens a lot in software engineering, believe me! Everyone brags a lot about their successes, which is fine, you should too, but we tend to forget that success only happens at the end of a looooong road full of failures.

On the plus side, this will be a short read

By the way, thanks again MPJ for articulating all this so clearly, go watch this video:

Contentful…

First, what is contentful?

Contentful is a content management system (CMS). So, you put your content there, edit it, process it through different steps, and then publish it. There are APIs and lots of integration options that make Contentful a nice choice for a CMS. I first heard of it because it was recommended by technical bloggers like me that use a similar blog infrastructure (ie. Gatsby).

…with Gatsby

So, wow, I found an article showing how to set up GatsbyJS+Contentful in 5 minutes, that is something I want to try!

Nice move, Contentful!

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Well… hum… not really . This how-to would have been useful If I did not already have a Gatsby blog because it describes how to start a new one from a starter.

Gatsby’s documentation

So, Awesome! I found another one from Gatsby’s documentation website: “sourcing from contentful” .

This one seems to better fit the context of this blog.

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Bwah seems too much hassle.

Let’s recap:

• I found some cool tech,
• I tried to use it but it did not fit my context,
• I found another one fitting but it requires too much effort.

Time to re-evaluate the effort based on my “business” need:

• there is no business need .
• the way I provide content fits my workflow

Me talking to myself using “business” hat versus “dev team” hat:

Well, let’s decide to avoid Hype Driven Development and just stick to doing what is strictly necessary from a “business” point of view!

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Conclusion

So, I’ll just keep pushing my markdown content to the repo… and refactor this later if I really need to, and if new business requirements emerge.

Also, I — the dev team — still learned a few things in 20 minutes about Contentful + Gatsby, but did not want to extend this time further.

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you have any feedback about how it make you almost laugh, fix my lame jokes, content, or my english, send me a message on Twitter.