I developed Gatsby Keynote (was: Gatsby Deck) for a presentation I held at my workplace; we have this nice format called "Talks" that lets us give presentations to our peers on any topic we're interested in. Being a Gatsby enthusiast, I decided my talk would be "Intro to Gatsby".
As I was thinking about how to deliver the presentation in an interesting way, I had this fun (kinda meta) idea: what if the presentation was a Gatsby app itself?
I would go through the presentation like it was an ordinary keynote, and then, at the very last slide... BOOOM, I'd summon my IDE via a deep link and proceed to the big reveal: this whole thing is in fact a Gatsby app!
This is the first POC I developed: just the basic logic I needed to to control a series of dynamically-generated pages with arrow keys.
The rest of the job consisted in carefully crafting an exact replica of my company's PowerPoint template in SCSS (remember, it had to look like the real thing!), and creating the content. I had a lot of fun building this project.
This project was originally named "Gatsby Deck", but I'm changing it to "Gatsby Keynote". Why? Gatsby Deck seemed like a perfect name and I was so convinced my idea was 100% NEW AND ORIGINAL.
Well, turns out, when I was in the process of choosing "gatsby-deck" as my custom Netlify slug, it was already taken. And the project it hosted... was another implementation of the exact same idea (albeit much simpler UI-wise), with the exact same name. And that project, was in turn inspired by another one, and so on. Just some minutes ago I discovered that also gatsby-slides is taken! : ) You get the idea.
Apparently many other people came to my same conclusions when putting together "Gatsby" & "slides". That is not to say the idea is worthless; if anything, it's validated! This served as a reminder that it's really hard to conceive something truly original in the digital space.
Anyway, I'll still build my keynotes in Gatsby -- it's awesome : )
I wanted to create a Gatsby theme, but then after realizing the world hardly needs another project like this, I put it on hold. Nonetheless, I improved the UI with navigation controls, a settings pane, and new slide formats.
