Moving away from Medium

After a couple of years using Medium as my blog, I decided to move away from Medium and use Gatsby (a static website generator).

Main issues with Medium were:

• Limited articles readers can access.
• No code highlight for code-snippets (I always thought this was something that Medium would fix with the time), the only alternative was using Github Gists but this means that I need to create a Gist for every code-snippet that I wanted to show.
• Internet access was require to write a build my articles.

After checking some alternatives, I ended up considering Gatsby as a really good alternative for the job.

Main advantages of using Gatsby:

• Free hosting using multiples hosting solutions: Github Pages (I’m using this), Netlify and more…
• Static generated (no need for a server to render the pages) during build time.
• I can compose and write articles without internet connection using markdown and view the final result in my local environment
• Advance code highlight - I’m using syntax theme based on https://github.com/sdras/night-owl-vscode-theme/

Example:

class DynamoDbMessageRepository implements MessageRepository{    /**
     * @var DynamoDbClient
     */
    protected $client;

    /**
     * @var MessageSerializer
     */
    protected MessageSerializer $serializer;

    /**
     * @var string
     */
    protected string $tableName;

    public function __construct(DynamoDbClient $client, MessageSerializer $serializer, string $tableName)
    {
        $this->client = $client;
        $this->serializer = $serializer;
        $this->tableName = $tableName;    }

    public function retrieveAll(AggregateRootId $id): Generator
    {
        $query = [
            'TableName' => $this->tableName,
            'KeyConditionExpression' => 'aggregateRootId = :v1',
            'ExpressionAttributeValues' => [
                ':v1' => ['S' => $id->toString()],
            ]
        ];

        $result = $this->client->getPaginator('Query', $query);

        return $this->yieldMessagesForResult($result);
    }
}

• Great documentation and integration. Gatsby integrates almost with anything and more important it expose to developers always the same API in GraphQL independent of what you are connecting to (MySQL, Headless CMS, Wordpress, etc…).

Until now, it has been a great experience and I highly recommend you to give it a try.