Personal portfolio: Gatsby vs Next?

We are big fans of 11Ty or Eleventy - however, you want to call it. 😀

We got over a 35% performance boost compared to WordPress.

11ty was super simple to learn, build, and extend. Only took us 1.5 days to code and deploy to Firebase. The more popular site generators had more 'stuff', more 'plugins' - seemed too much for our needs. Even Google's web.dev platform runs on 11ty.

Gatsby, Jekyll, Hogo - I am sure they are all good. It all depends on the size and complexity of your needs.

Bottom line: Use any open Static Site Generator, with a bias towards Open Source.
They are way better than WordPress (or any old school CMS). You will enjoy a faster site, more security, and much more freedom.

AFAIK, there is no alternative to Server-Side Rendered SPA in ones that take more traditional approaches, e.g. Jekyll, Hugo. -- Is there something analogous to <Link/> for other SSG?

I prefer Nuxt.js, but that is because it is convenient, not necessary because it is perfect for SEO. Also, fully static generated mode is relatively new.. Want some components in Markdown (MDX)? That is also relatively new.

Actually, I am looking at Next.js for stark simplicity, of folder structures, at the same level of Nuxt. (Nuxt is much more fully featured, though.)

Gatsby might be a better choice, for exactly that it is not truly simple, but has lots of useful plugin, including lazy image loading and MDX. However,

• It highly wants you to use GraphQL, rather than REST API.
• I generally like working from scratch, rather than from templates.
• Folder structure isn't as perfect as Next.js

I loved my experience using Gatsby! Re-did my site using it in just a few short weeks on the weekends. Highly recommend it!

• I initially went with Jekyll as the most mature community, but felt sort of hamstrung by the fact that I don't know Ruby 😅. I decided to try a JS-based one.
• I looked hard at Gatsby, but it seemed like a bit much for what I wanted to do.
• I downloaded a Hexo example and played with it a little, but the whole theming thing was sort of a turnoff--for me it's easier to just write my own CSS (not that you can't turn off the theming in Hexo; it just seemed like most of the documentation/tooling was geared toward someone who likes their default theming system).
• I settled on Eleventy. The documentation is a little light because it's a young community (you won't find as many StackOverflow answers, for example, compared to something like Jekyll), but it's dead simple to use and it seems like they've done a good job of establishing simple, sensible defaults while allowing as much customization as you want.

I use Hugo for my personal blog. I think it's fairly simple. I deploy to netlify anytime I push to master. The generation of new articles and configuration is pretty good. I've been hearing great things about Next.

I read an article recently about Gatsby (I think it was on dev.to) which pointed out that even though Gatsby renders static pages, by default it then proceeds to download a big fat JS bundle to do the "hydration" thing. In many cases (a portfolio site comes to mind) that's just overkill and unnecessary overhead (according to the author).

I would tend to agree, but then it got interesting - the author pointed out that there are workarounds (Gatsby plugins) which do away with the JS bundle and the hydration so that you have a truly minimal static site, without JS, generated with Gatsby.

The author then proceeded to question "what then is the point of Gatsby" but it got me thinking nevertheless.

Currently my working solution has been good old Server Side Includes. Yes, that is .shtml files. It isn't perfect, but works very well for a small personal site and it is simple. The challenging part is to split the repeating parts into their own HTML files and then include these as needed. The downside compared to pure HTML files is that you need to have a server running to be able to make sure you don't make mistakes before pushing changes to production.

However over time I probably make most of my smaller sites run on Deno + Oak. It is very simple to do the static parts with that combination and you don't really need to have any kind of bundle, build, or compile phase if you don't want to. And things feel much easier in general as there is no node_modules to deal with. I guess the biggest challenge is to make sure the Deno app keeps on running in production :)

After long initial picking options and trying this and that I’ve settled with Nuxt.js full static and Storyblok. It’s relatively easy (more so if you already know Vue, which is also easy to learn), configurable and flexible. Gridsome/Gatsby force the supposed “right way” of doing things a little bit too much for my liking

I built my portfolio website using Next its pretty good but I did have a lot of bugs getting the pages to render properly at the start. If I was to do it again I would most likely go with Gatsby because it does not seem to be difficult to get it working with a CMS which would be good for freelance jobs. So it just makes sense to use it more often so that I become a natural with it. create-react-app is still my default way for creating react apps.

I don't have a personal portfolio yet 🙃.

With that said, a personal site is where you can explore tech stacks with relatively more freedom compared to making websites for clients/products. Gatsby, Next, and dozens of other (meta-)frameworks take different approaches; naturally, they all address some aspects well and some other different aspects not very well.

IMO you should choose a stack you're interested in, but not very familiar/skilled with. That way, you get a better understanding of how it works, and whether it would be a good fit for your next production site.