[vladgur]

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

[CSSer]

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]

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]

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.

[swyx]

we do live in a society