In November 2020, 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 the next month was going to be busy.

Later that day, I got some responses from the Rudderstack 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 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.

I learned so much on this project and Gavin, the project manager, is the coolest guy on the planet to work with. I also was able to ask questions to their head of product, Kostas, and felt so much respect from his responses.

One of the most enjoyable parts of this project, was learning to work with an engineering team, and receiving the other team members input on the progress and methods I was using to develop the plugin.

I did not do most of the engineering. I started with a similar plugin for Gatsby, that interacts with the Segment API, and slightly updated some things to work with Rudderstack.

Please check out the project on Gatsby, or Github, and leave a review of the code in a Github issue, if you have the time!