Why I started Flatbread

[tonyketcham]

I love tea, particularly raw puer tea (which formally hails from Yunnan, China). It's similar to wine in the concept of terroir and certain vintages being particularly good. It can also be aged in various environments to different effects.

Anyway, I started getting into the stuff and found a community there. I wanted to learn more and place terroir, processing, storage, and cultivar to taste. My memory's not the best, so I decided to start a log where I'd take down notes on the tea, including data on its origin, brewing style of the session, flavor axes, vendor I got it from, ranking how it tickles my fancy, and more.

I originally built the proof of concept in Vue 2 + Gridsome, with Netlify CMS creating relational markdown files as a sort of database I could query through Gridsome's GraphQL layer. It was awesome and the best part is this stack is generously free to run on the web these days, save for renewing the domain name for $4 a year 🤫

Unfortunately, Gridsome stopped receiving support and I kept butting heads with the framework when I'd try to integrate tech that should be agnostic to the data. It became a serious productivity blocker and left me wanting more. I looked at Gatsby and found a similar trend of it wanting too much control over your stack.

So why isn't there something that doesn't care what frameworks and frontend libraries you use? Intro: Flatbread - it does one thing and one thing well - gives you a nice DX to query flatfile, relational data in an auto-generated GraphQL schema + API.

Flatbread lets you bring all your toys (albeit scoped to the JAMstack or SSR) with none of the fluff you don't need. You should be able to hotswap your stack entirely and keep Flatbread.

Here's where Flatbread first saw daylight: https://github.com/tonyketcham/puerh.wtf/tree/refactor/sveltekit-flatbread