Upgrading Gatsby from v2 to 4

After a 3 year hiatus, I’ve finally decided that maybe it’s time to start writing online again. But, of course before that, it’s time for a rewrite of the website a version upgrade of the current blog’s static site generator. Even though there’s no material change to the design and content of the blog, except for some added and discarded spacing here and there, working on upgrading the blog and editing the new version has made me rather proud of the entire codebase and project (again). I suppose something about coding and craftsmanship and the sense of pride that it gives.

This got me thinking a little about coding and craft, and how craft doesn’t necessarily require perfection (perfection itself being a rather loaded idea). Since working at Shopify, I’ve started to realise—a little silly considering how long I’ve supposedly spent doing this professionally—that although clean, elegant code is something beautiful to look at and reason about, it’s ultimately still the compiled (or interpreted) output, the program itself, that matters. But I suppose the question also is: what encompasses the product or output? Is it just the end product, like a webpage or app, or does it include the source code and related artefacts too? What am I writing the code for?

In any case, a post to inaugurate this website’s refresh.

Resources that I’ve found useful for getting from v2 to v4

• Gatsby: Migrating from v2 to v3
• Gatsby: Migrating from v3 to v4
• Gatsby: Migrating from gatsby-image to gatsby-plugin-image
• chore(starters): Migrate starters to Head API (#36234)
• feat(gatsby-starter-blog): Remove typography.js (#27001)