I don't have experience with Gatsby. Why am I building a Gatsby plugin then?
Tags: gatsby, javascript, react, webdev
Published: 2020-12-01 19:15:03


I don't have experience with Gatsby.

The only experience I had had before with Gatbsy was going through some of the docs and deciding to use NuxtJs for my personal portfolio website instead of Gatsby, but **last week I started work on a Gatsby Plugin.**

## What I'm building.

Two weeks ago, I posted a message in the JAM Stack community slack that in December, I was open to more project work. I had been getting a little slow and wanted to make sure next month was going to be busy. 

Later that day, I got some responses from the [Rudderstack](https://rudderstack.com/) team asking me if I would be willing to work on a plugin for Gatsby that would make it easy for people to track events on their Gatsby frontends. 

I was excited about the opportunity, but I was a bit nervous, knowing that I had no previous experience even remotely like what the team was asking for.

**The Rudderstack team wanted a plugin for Gatsby developers to easily be able to get their Gatsby frontends up and running with custom event tracking through their API.** 

When I first saw the [GitHub issue](https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server/issues/655) and description of the problem, I knew I had never done what they were wanting, but the opportunity was super exciting to me.

After the guys asked me about taking the project on in Slack, I decided to take a second look at the issue and decide whether it was a problem that I could tackle. Based on the project description, and a similar plugin that they wanted to simulate, I decided to give the project a go.

Soon hopefully, you will be able to easily set up your Gatsby websites with Rudderstack, and quickly get custom event tracking easily configured.

## Why am I doing it?

**The project is open source,** and lately, I have been doing my best to start contributing more consistently to open source projects. 

I was given advice a couple of months ago from a great developer to get more involved with open source to market myself better. **My goal is to start working long term with a great company,** and he said that one of the best ways to start marketing myself as a developer is to start doing work in the open.

Another reason why I decided to take on this project is that **it’s paid!** Even though the plugin will be open source, the Rudderstack team has decided to pay a developer to develop it! 

According to GitHub and the Rudderstack team, I will be the first developer to work on an open-source project and be paid for it. When I heard that, **I was blown away by the Rudderstack teams’ decision to trust me with this project.**

The last reason why I am developing this Gatsby plugin is that a few weeks ago I read a blog to junior developers about how to grow as a developer. One of the main points in the article was to say “yes” to solving problems you have never solved before.
 
**The developer stated that one of the best ways to grow as a junior is by doing things that put you outside of your comfort zone.** I am doing my best to become a stellar developer, and I know I will grow while working on this plugin, and the Netlify Function for it.

## Concluding thoughts.

I’m so grateful to be able to work on this project. Even in preparation, and getting started, I’ve learned a lot. 

**I’m thankful to the Rudderstack team for giving me this opportunity.** Make sure to check out [their website](https://rudderstack.com/) and look at [their issue list](https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server/issues) for other projects that are paid!

If you have any advice or input on the best way of going about testing and developing a Gatsby plugin, please let me know in the comments. I greatly appreciate it.