Hello everyone! I wanted to ask a question about whether I should start learning Gatsby + CMS now and then transition my blogger blog to Gatsby. My only concern is that I haven’t finished JavaScript yet and I don’t know React.
However, thanks to this blog post (this is not advertisement this is a resource I found to help me please don’t de-list this post):
I feel like I can just piece together a blog using a Gatsby theme, some sort of CMS (in between sanity and Netlify CMS although if you have a suggestion please share), and netlify or gatsby cloud for hosting. I YouTubed the topic and found tons of tutorials on YouTube and in the FCC publication.
My current skills are:
Basic JS
intermediate CSS
intermediate HTML
Should I go all-in to get my blog out blogger while I still can (and get some dev experience while I’m at it) or should I wait a few months until I’ve learnt React and full JS?
If you “haven’t finished JavaScript yet and I don’t know React” then I think you should learn React first. I haven’t used Gatsby, but learning React is hard enough without adding something else. And I imagine that trying to learn Gatsby without knowing React - I don’t even know if that would be possible.
I know the urge to jump ahead, but I think you at least need some fundamentals first.
I’ve done some research and Gatsby is actually built on React so i suppose waiting until I’ve done the react portion of front-end libraries is probably best.
However, even though I don’t know react should I still at least experiment with gatsby with an example website or something else?
Well, you can do what you want. Me, I wouldn’t want to start trying to read French poetry until I at least got a basic command of French. I don’t think sitting there, making up fake pronunciations and having no idea what it is saying - I don’t know how productive that would be.
But if you can look at some Gatsby site and understand what is happening, if you find that productive, then go for it.
Seems like a good time to start learning React. I don’t think there is anything wrong with using your Gatsby blog project as a practical application of React. I have definitely seen React courses that use Gatsby to teach React (and Gatsby as well obviously).
I do agree that it might be a bit distracting to try and learn both at the same time on your own. But there are tons of articles and tutorials you can use for help. You also do not have to be amazing at React to get going with Gatsby. There are good starter templates to help you get started.
I would like to start react but I feel like I need to finish j
FCC JS first but thanks for the advice(Btw if anyone has any experience with a CMS a story or explanation would help lol)
Yeah, I mean, React is based on JS so it is good to know. That being said, if you have the basics of JS down, you’ll probably be OK. There is however a lot of ES6 commonly used in React, like arrow functions, destructuring, let/const, and classes. If you have those, it’s probably OK to start looking at it.
Just keep in mind that React is a different way of thinking and there is a steep learning curve in the beginning. It can be daunting at first, but once you get it, it is quite powerful and elegant.