Developer based in Austin, TX.
Gatsby does an incredible amount of cool stuff for you, automatically. This makes Gatsby an incredibly powerful, versatile tool -- but also can make it difficult to explain what Gatsby does in a concise and approachable way. Let's look at race cars, Neo from The Matrix, and a few other fun ways to frame the many amazing things Gatsby does for users.
You don't need to use source plugins (or create Gatsby nodes) to pull data into a Gatsby site! This article explores how to use Gatsby without GraphQL (using "unstructured data"), and some of the pros and cons of doing so.