Gatsby Interview Questions and Answers for experienced
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What is Gatsby?
- Answer: Gatsby is a free and open-source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing-fast websites and apps. It uses static site generation (SSG) to pre-render pages at build time, resulting in excellent performance and SEO.
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Explain the difference between Gatsby's build process and a traditional server-side rendering approach.
- Answer: Gatsby builds the entire website at build time, creating static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. This contrasts with server-side rendering (SSR), where pages are generated on demand for each request. Gatsby's pre-rendering leads to faster load times and improved SEO, while SSR requires a server to run and generate pages dynamically.
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How does Gatsby handle data fetching?
- Answer: Gatsby uses a plugin-based system to fetch data from various sources like Markdown files, CMSs (Contentful, WordPress, etc.), APIs (GraphQL, REST), and databases. Data fetching happens during the build process, ensuring all data is available when the site is deployed.
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What is Gatsby's GraphQL data layer and why is it important?
- Answer: Gatsby uses GraphQL to query data from various sources. It provides a single, unified interface for fetching data, regardless of its origin. This simplifies data management and makes it easier to build complex components with data from multiple sources.
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Explain the concept of Gatsby's page creation process.
- Answer: Gatsby pages are created using page templates and data fetched from the configured sources. Gatsby uses the data to render the pages at build time. This approach allows for dynamic content while still maintaining the speed advantages of static site generation.
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How do you optimize images in Gatsby?
- Answer: Gatsby offers built-in image optimization through plugins like `gatsby-plugin-sharp` and `gatsby-transformer-sharp`. These plugins allow for resizing, format conversion (WebP), and other optimizations to improve image load times and reduce file sizes.
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What are Gatsby plugins and how do they extend Gatsby's functionality?
- Answer: Gatsby plugins are packages that add functionality to Gatsby. They can handle tasks such as data fetching, image processing, SEO optimization, analytics tracking, and much more. They extend Gatsby's core functionality, allowing developers to customize and expand the framework's capabilities.
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Describe how you would implement routing in a Gatsby application.
- Answer: Gatsby uses React Router under the hood. Routes are defined using page templates and their corresponding paths. When a user navigates to a specific path, Gatsby renders the appropriate page template. No explicit configuration of React Router is typically needed.
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How does Gatsby handle JavaScript code splitting?
- Answer: Gatsby automatically handles code splitting, meaning that only the necessary JavaScript code for a given page is loaded. This improves initial load time and the overall performance of the website. This is handled largely by Gatsby's build process and the way it organizes the output files.
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