Supper Club × What's New With Astro with Fred Schott

like, kind of superpower that just yeah. Every everything up to this point has been alright. You're going to a new page. Let's just, like, Shoot you out, like, slingshot you off the old page into the new one, but this is letting you kinda bridge it in a much more interesting way. Yeah. The The big thing is that the browser has kinda provided these APIs, and they did it in a really interesting way. So, they've actually kinda slowly been implementing this with a JavaScript API first With the goal of a full HTML CSS API second. So you can actually control this fully without JavaScript. Zero JavaScript page transition.

and where all the browsers are heading. That's still a little ways off.

Gives you the ability to, like, name an element On on both pages so I can transition and kinda more for, you know, say, this should fade, this should slide. So we kind of build our API in In a way that kinda wraps

HTML page and that sidebar gets bigger.

fade them outside them in, Yeah. That's something I never wanna go back to. It's like, oh, wait. Does this feature actually run? Let me check out open up my browser support matrix, and, oh, they don't have that. So I have to less to configure, like I don't know if they just, like, Specifically want, like, all local in the browser versus, like, a server that's running somewhere in the enterprise cloud.

Seamless transition versus just a hard cut to the next page you click. That's by far the biggest one in terms of what that means for how you can build and what you're actually able to build in Astro. That's so Cool. So, like, how does how how have you implemented that? So, like, anyone who's, go pursue this other idea that we had that we were, like, really excited about, but, like, snowpack needed to exist to power it. Like,

like, listening to this, if you transition as you got 1 HTML page You've got a sidebar,

The browser will know how to animate the sidebar from its smaller state to its larger state when you go from literally an HTML page to another Some big stuff's going out that's not, like, huge, and they're like, oh my god. You have to relearn astro, but, like, it really kinda changes the game in what's possible. Maybe give us, like a a 1 minute rundown of what Astro is as well, because I know not everyone had listened to the last episode, and people are are tuning in right now being like, should I listen to this one? Good podcast hosting.

0 JavaScript page transitions is the goal,

Morph elements from 1 page to another,

implemented that and and sort of made it easy for people to use this new API? Yeah. It's it is a fascinating, You figure out how to make it swoopy You know, like, we had lamp stack, and then we had the MERN stack, and we had, what else?

and you got another

HTML page, which is is wild for me.

that prerenders

So we bring a much, much lighter weight version of that to the, browsers that need it so that it's controlled by JavaScript Yes.

It means that you are still controlling this behind the scenes with a basically, like, a 3 kilobyte JavaScript layer, until that full HTML and CSS layer exists, but this is for now powering these transitions,

I'm I cry when I need to clear my cache, and, obviously, that's been fixed.

pretty much across astro.

Which type you'd like it to be? Yeah. That was a big so that's a big change if you use the old image integration. So we built it separate from Astro at first, experimented

for anybody to access that. I I think that this is really cool that you are focusing in on this, and I didn't even think that this would be, like, a next

in JavaScript, we got the history and push state APIs, which is How you can change the URL bar without actually reloading the page. Before that, we had to literally change the hash Transpilation

Now we've merged it into Astro, so it's in core in v three.

It's always hard to know with specs, like, how much there's a narrative or a a longer term vision, but you can kind of tell this is all part of the story of making the web Easier to build these things natively without frameworks having to do so much heavy lifting. If we as frameworks can tap into the net the native browser API, It just means a lot less work, a lot more consistency, has started to unlock a couple of really interesting features that we just haven't been able to see anywhere So I mentioned that image built in optimization, with the popular projects were good at marketing. I think Before Twitter, it was probably conferences. Before conferences, probably email list. Like, I'd say it's kinda more the annoying if anything, like, this API changed or this, import changed, but it's not like our router changed or anything that drastic. So we have a really great upgrade guide. I'd recommend anyone with an ASTRO site looking at ASTRO 3 to definitely check that out. Our docs team did an incredible job. It's Item by item, here's what had changed. Here's I can't remember if it says why, but, like, here's if it affects you or not, and if it does affect you, here's what to do. And you can just kinda breeze through it, try Trying to keep it as informative as possible. No guesswork. No digging through change logs to find out what broke. It's it's fairly,

It's it works a lot like other frameworks. We didn't really wanna reinvent the wheel. You import your images if they're local, There's no perfect answer there. Right? Like, either you do 1 once every 5 years and it's a huge ordeal that, like, breaks your community,

using, community day.

I just haven't updated my site yet, but, like,

serving data. So yeah. No. It's, I think it's really awesome that you guys are are taking the approach where it's like, we're we're not only gonna focus on the API, the browser API, but we're also going to make it easy for a full archive of all of our shows.

And also just like, I wanted to connect this to Cloudinary

Yeah. Those things are just built in, or they're really easy to do, like a card transition or a a swipe up or anything. Any type of, like, page route

if the browser doesn't support these new APIs. That's nice.

and it lets frameworks then move on to tackling the next problem. So there always feels like this is kind of, like, persist like a video player across pages, and doing all that without I and I always saw that as more like That's a philosophical thing that Rich believes, not, like, necessarily,

And then we also do a good job with polyfilling on even older browsers too. So we actually kinda work all the way down the stack even if Your browser doesn't support our 2nd, which is a fairly scary thought. It is. Yeah.

Turns out images are hard to work with, but,

view transitions today. It still runs. Oh, really? I was gonna ask that because it it you know, Firefox and Safari support are still, like, out

kinda leap frogs over a lot early problems that we've seen other frameworks struggle with. Like, how how does it work? Let let's let's dive into that. Because if somebody with a Gatsby website

we tried to have some pretty basic support without going too far. And, again, that's kind of the nice thing is if you really wanna connect this to some other

So we try to smooth out all these edges, you know, users, It's cool, but, like, it also can be recreated in JavaScript. It's not as nice. You kinda wish you had the browser API, but it's essentially what these spas, these full JavaScript apps have been doing since, you know, 5 years ago where you have the whole thing in the browser available to kind of animate and transform.

For view transitions. And and it's one of those things I I added to the the syntax beta site

Point what frameworks will start to be implementing, but it makes a lot of sense because

Yeah. A 100%.

40,000 images or something silly like that. I'm I'm, And less and less about the actual markup. And, also, you you have issues with like, not you, but I I've known in the past that there's been issues with, like, Do you want it to be fixed within height image, or do you want it to be fluid? we we felt this

Do you still have to specify or do you need to do that at all in Astro, specify

in your URL bar because There's nothing else you could change in the URL bar without, 14, 15 months apart, so it was a bit of a whirlwind initially. We we thought we were being smart and Just kinda grouping them together.

built in image optimization, and you can just skip it all during build. So even static sites,

and serverless sites on Vercel, for example, can tap into their build API

between the 2.

In a a mobile context, you know, community first is probably one of the reasons how you do ship so much. Has it, like, been difficult,

Wait for the platform to catch up. You go out ahead and explore, and that's like the 1st proving ground on a lot of these ideas. If they're good ideas, they'll make it back into the spec. If they're not, then that framework just did that weird thing, and we're all just gonna pretend it didn't happen,

in Chrome just to Just because it's like it degrades gracefully, and it's a great API to get used to. But,

Why can't we just have that as an API? Oh, just using the image I mean, this uses the image tag. It's it's really, like, Similar to how we're using view transitions and kinda letting the browser do all the work, we're not doing a lot of work on top of the image tag. What we're trying to really like, 90% of our complexity is Taking the source image that you just dropped into your repo and making sure that that's gonna render as optimally as possible. So it's really about the asset

image priority, things that are just kind of not you know, all text is required. We're trying to mainly, I I've seen a ton of reward just in seeing

to JS doc? Oh, right. Yeah. They moved their internal code base Back to JavaScript, so the background very quickly is that Astro was formed,

but using JS dot comments to give you typing anyway? Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. That's And it was just that was a a really nice message for us. It helped us stay focused. I think a lot of our early adoption, early success was really based on our our focus there.

you know, that the whole team got together and voted, and this is what we want. So we haven't seen I haven't seen any real need for it, and I think we're pretty happy with TypeScript. So, yeah, we're probably sticking around. Oh, that's good to hear. Okay. One of the major needs that they pointed out of why they did it is that if you are that's found its way into our open source community, it's actually just like the focus of, dark mode, side barn, site nav, typography, code block search. Yeah. All these things getting built on.

it and there's no build step there, then it's it takes that out of it. So I I've never built a framework like That's why I don't know. Yeah. That's a good point. Like, Svelte runs on the front end

The Astro code base, do you write that in In TypeScript? And if so, what do you think about the Svelte move

working in Svelte,

If you're dev ing on

to just bring that as close to source as possible. Yeah. It'll be really interesting once this, Yeah. For sure. Yeah. No idea when you, the listener, are listening, but for us, it is

that needs to happen and trying to debug it is slow and confusing. So if you're

continues to see some updates. I'm I'm seeing this. It looks like there was And update it in March 2023, so I might wanna dive into this thing to see. This is the, like, make JavaScript add types to JavaScript keywords?

TypeScript

Compile it all down to whatever the target is you set means you can write modern code.

Right? One thing that I'd never wanna go back to is worrying about the code I write not running in certain browsers, so I will say that's, like, a really nice thing that TypeScript does for us. I'm I'm sure Babble and other things do, but, like, A lot of it's just,

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, that's great.

Okay. Well, let's talk about sick picks and shameless plugs. Did you come with a sick pick For us today, anything that you think is sick or cool? I always I think I made this mistake last time. It's not a picture. It's a sick pic. It is not a picture. It could be a picture. Yeah. It could be if you have a sick thing. Wait. This is gonna work out of audio.

Bundled code or TypeScript code is just such a pain. Like, yeah, there's definitely something there, I don't know if anyone can see there's a light being shown in my face right now. It's very dark all of a sudden.

Good for them. That's super cool. I I think we like TypeScript too much, but I totally respect why they do. I think Rich has always been,

And you're writing in TypeScript, and then the the code base itself is written in TypeScript. There's, like, this, like, double

a crab that's holding a cigarette. That's pretty cool.

and is, like, way like, everything we do is almost, like, part of your build. So if it breaks, The build breaks, it's not like if it breaks your code base breaks. Yeah. It's kind of maybe the the difference there. So, yeah, there's like this kind of golden, like, Especially with the SM now working in the browser. If you can get your source code as close as possible with its chip, absolutely. Like, yeah, debugging, and Gatsby getting acquired by Netlify, and I I tweeted about this Realizing Mhmm. They've kind of laxed on their commits to that repo. It seems a little dead. I think they picked it back up since, but I think there's a lot of, like, and that's what helps us work on it full time.

Go search Stack Overflow for the polystyrene. Oh my god. Never again. Never again. Yeah. That was brutal. Never again. Yeah. I know. If I have to write another browser prefix for CSS. That'll put me in a happy place in life.

types of comments proposal

supper club, we have the first ever

And now, as of, you know, on hardware support. And, you know, here we are on the web Getting the full page alone between things like we're 2nd class citizens here for the for,

Three time guest

you know, very, very recently here, Astro 3 is hitting the, hitting the ground. By the time you're listening to this, Astro 3 will be,

ready to go for you. So we're gonna be talking all about Astro 3 along with some of the new cool stuff coming down the line from the Astro team as well during their launch week. My name is Scott Taliska. I'm a developer from Denver. With me, as always, is Wes.

This is Fred Schott. He's talking about Astro once again. In fact, Last time we had Freda on, it was for the release of Astro 2.

In today's

This

Wash those hands, pull up a chair, and secure that feed bag, because it's time to listen to Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers. I thought there was gonna be food,

is the Syntax supper club.

so buckle up and grab that o handle because this was going to get wide eyed as old.

Welcome to Syntax.

That's a beautiful site.

I don't know what the Businesses there, but it's, like, definitely something we use every day in our own repo. Yeah. Those tools are really cool. That's they they're all popping up lately. We're having Oh. I think they just I don't know. I don't know. It's a the the nice part about renting for all of its flaws is we just to get out of there, but still Spent yeah. What? Like, a decade now on Twitter. I feel like I've honed the algorithm enough to get me good information.

Sir, that's right. Sure. We can come up with something. We'll we'll make it work. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that will change the conversation

For us on open source, it's really nice having these hosted tools that let us repro and share code really well. I think for, like, code sharing, it's, like, just a Huge superpower for, like, the world. Like, so much more efficient to be able to, like, here's some actual code. You can open this link and reproduce it.

Oh,

Yeah. Spell

Templates. Oh, I think the product itself is maybe Angular, I wanna say.

I think it's all I think enterprises, yes. I think enterprises want it really bad. It's like If you wanna go above and beyond with some provider that supports more or you wanna optimize your images Beforehand in a custom flow, Twitter, a lot of it comes through. So Wappalyzer.

is, like, Versus Code just hosted, but, like, their marketing side, I mean, is it is it

None of those are as catchy as the ass stack. None of them. What what what's the Aztec? Astro, Svelte, and man, it's a it's a while. I work in feed every day, and I didn't know it was really worth They do such a good job at So let's talk about

what do they use for their

if anyone wants to to go visit it.

it's all built in Astro. Did they

Yeah. I'm looking here. Here's my trusty, Kinda dogfooding them for us has been really helpful. So when a deal come like that comes around, is that like a, In fact, it was an iPhone factory, a clone. And I was the whole time, I was thinking, I'm just refactoring code right now. That's what I got. But yeah. Exactly. It's, really addicting. I probably sunk, yeah,

Built marketing site built with Astro.

But I feel like that's something that I've seen enterprise talk about where it's like, You know what? We have a 1,000 developers, and we don't wanna have to manage everyone's machines. Like, let's just automate this and and wash our hands a bit.

Svelte, it looks like. I see Svelte showing up on the screen.

Smelt, tailwind, and Astro. Sat. The fat

I do not know how to navigate.

I think everybody is ready for the Aztec. And, honestly, that That used to be talk about open source marketing. That used to be it. Yeah. All you needed was a That's all you needed. Acronym for your stack.

What where do you go to keep up to date With stuff because it you know, especially, like, browser APIs, it seems like that's something you gotta be, like, really up on, running a project like this. Like so for you, How how are you staying up with these browser APIs, this modern stuff? I'm yeah. I I find it really difficult with specs

That's a really nice so it's idx.dev

serverless

Someone on from Google next And everybody's just like, where where's the Where's them going on? You guys are trying to Yeah. You guys alright. Something's up. Yeah. Something's going on.

stack.

You can yeah. That's yeah. A a s s is definitely an acronym you could too difficult to, put together. Honestly, I really think in in 2023, we are ready for the Aztec.

Something googly. But, Oh, yeah. Not sorry. Not not the actual product. The the product itself

Yeah. Oh, there you go. Wow. It tells us so much better than anything we could build. It's, like, kind of painful to see. Like, damn it. This is is actually announcing launching our docs template.

That's beautiful. So what's the dot JPEG. I took it right off my digital camera, and it's 19 megs.

Is it really? d c I m underscore 5,002 So how have you Are you still using Vite as your tooling under the hood, or was that what you were using? Yeah. We are powered by Vite.

week Nice. Talk about, Google's IDX.

tailwind and Astro. Wait. There's there's gotta be an acronym for that.

Specifically, I think unless you're, like, fully living in that world, it's really hard to stay on top of, oh, this repo's out of date. We actually moved over to this, like, it's This mailing list post links to this repo. It's it's a big world out there that And

Work with these types of

So I have my marketing site that's super fast. I have my, like, SaaS app that's behind the login page, and that's just like a

Yeah. That's, like, certainly what I thought. Yeah. Yeah. I Wes, did you see that tweet?

model fairly seriously.

Oh, edge middleware, of course.

New use case that's unlocked by the feature that we're still feeling out, but it's really weird and really interesting to see people starting to use it for this. Nice.

features to improve the platform, or or, like, how does that even come about? Yeah. We're fairly unique in that we take our open source,

treat Astro like a create react app or a a Veed almost.

Kind of mixing and matching based on your use case. That's something that we don't really talk about a lot in this, release post, But we've been making a lot of improvements to the react flow, and now we're starting to see that more and more. So it's this weird, like, feature and then also like a

No. No. I I surprisingly didn't. I I I saw that there was something coming on Friday. I got so many DMs of, like, oh my god. Is this real? Like, yeah, it was I, Guillermo tweeted out something like, we have some astronomically good news, and everybody's like, oh, okay. Oh. It's like Wow. It's a I saw that. I didn't catch That at all. That's funny. Did it? I saw that. I was like, that's not a very good teaser. That's, like Provester Versacell. They Versacell really has the, like, The hype on on dial with that type of stuff. People get really excited anytime. It was such a specific, like, 7:30 p it was like it Sound like a press release was going out. It really, kudos to them. They do a great job at that. They're trying to bury something on Friday night. You know? Like, what's going on here?

I don't have an AstroSight, but, yes, I certainly have split it up a couple times. One of the things we started with with Astro was just that content focus. And even before that, like, static

You mentioned, like, the frameworks can all kind of exist, happily within Astro. You can use react, you can use view.

announcement,

The HTML is now all minified and optimized. The rendering performance has been sped up. There's a really interesting thing about HMR then. This is kinda getting into the thing I wanted to get your thoughts on, about what you can use Astro for.

Incredible.

hey. We really like what you're doing with Astra. We would love to

Classic thank you. Yes. Astro is a web framework.

which yeah. The result team kinda teased, that JavaScript API. So it's actually supported in way more browsers today than the 0 JavaScript version is because we leverage that lower level API even if what we're shipping is Trying to feel a lot more like HTML c and CSS.

As, Wes, do you have an AstroSight? I know you've used it before.

Lets you actually run your middleware, which is an astro concept we already have. They give us the API, and we kind of Work with that API to deploy it to the edge closer to your users if that's what you want.

Yeah. Been really, really nice working with them and collaborating on them, and They're basically letting helping this API we finally settled on is really, really nice and solves a lot of the, And yeah. And then I think really good docs and really good tooling, whatever you can do to kinda help people as the other side of that coin. So,

and my APIs are powering either both or 1 or all or none.

So there's some really cool features that really I've only ever seen on Vercel. They do a really good job of connecting it all. So when we started talking about this with them, it just kinda felt like a no brainer.

early last year, created a company to basically help support the long term maintenance and sustainability of it. So Raise money. A couple of the core community, members got together, letting them help us, test all these new APIs.

code splitting of your routes. A lot of these are focused if you're if you're serving serverless like an actual server. Static sites are are Fairly easy no matter where you host.

content, there's no serverless, no server anything.

The weird trick that we've seen people start to do as well, an island is just a piece of UI on the page, so why don't I put an entire application on the page? It's 1 big island, and it's what, like, all the new all the cool new build tools are built on it. So Astro, SvelteKit, For space age travel, so once you get off the planet, where do you go next? for the most part, an improvement on our current doc site.

do they come to you and say,

hosting sponsor. Sir? Mhmm. But over the last couple of months, we've been really working closely with Vercel, especially with their build output API, That is,

There's some really nice speed up improvements.

All in the same code base very sneakily in a way that I think everyone was, like, oh my god, for sale

You know, I think there's a couple ways to do open source when,

Yeah. No. They've been awesome partners over the last couple of months. We actually have had, so Netlify was our previous,

with Vercel as a hosting partnership.

Yeah. Code splitting image optimization.

And a big thing that we've seen people now take Astrone kind of take away from us a bit is, well, I actually wanna have, sustain this project, and that's a huge milestone. I think that's something that kinda gets Lost in the conversation is that we are choosing to build more with this company for astro users, but the framework itself is fairly self sustaining. These sponsorships are a huge part of making it So that we can go build stuff for Astro developers and try to sustain even more, What am I doing? I was literally opening up my phone. Like, I wonder if I do have any Oh, an audio porta pot. Yeah.

But in addition to the performance, there's also just this really cool features that they unlock to make your site faster.

and essentially

is Astro.

when you when you all first

React felt view, they all started with, like, can I just put this on the page and, like, my old PHP server? That's what's gonna generate the page. This is just for this button or for this comment.

So working with a CMS or local markdown,

you know, that's the hard part about any of these other

this has been supported for forever. We're just the 1st ones to kinda connect it to a modern dev experience. So okay. That's that's Astro, yeah, that's Astro now. Okay. So we got that out. Let's let's talk about some of these Astro 3 goodies.

content and websites that are fast, really easy to build, But what they did thankfully was starting to ship a JavaScript API controlling this. So what we're able to do is basically give you an API that's gonna feel like what this all feels like in the platform API.

it turns out that, like, this is kind of, what all those frameworks were built Or so,

yeah. It's been a journey. I mean, it's it's it's easier than it looks Harder than it looks in a lot of ways. Like, building a web framework in general is difficult. I I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but, resources with the company. But for the most part, this project is self sustaining.

announced that that was, like, Something that could happen in Astro. I remember thinking that is extremely ambitious and, going to be very hard to pull off, but here Here we are, and you you all have really, really nailed it. So,

similar to your Next JS's and your SALT kits and your remixes and all the good JavaScript frameworks, but what makes Astra unique is our focus on, content sites.

surprise for us of how you can connect Astra in an interesting way. So Send some steaks. I'm I'm putting some ground breadcrumbs out there. Yeah. So the big launches, for this, view transitions are this really cool new feature that's actually a browser feature. We don't get any of the credit. We're Just the 1st web framework to really lean into them.

Frameworks is that they're typically they're choosing the view layer for you or the UI framework for you. Okay. You wanna build a site Next. Js. You are using React. Right? for just any old project, if you if you go to the Astrodox and you look at the, contributions page, you can just see How many people, like, truly believe on Syntax.

This is like in the DNA of everyone of these UI frameworks. So the idea of revisiting that, doing server rendering, but then using your components in more isolated kind of islands, coming through. You're actually a lower class, like, Governing citizen in this world, open and accessible for, like, 3 weeks while we work through the migration.

basically, our whole focus up to this point has been Getting you, a swag drop.

without all the complexity of, like, a JavaScript app architecture.

needs to be, like, good at marketing.

Recently, like a lot of open source projects have have swag. They have really good branding. They have a design team. They obviously have launch weeks and all that type of stuff. And,

And then Realizing, oh, wait. This is a launching. We should it was actually when Guillermo tweeted it. I was like, oh, no. People are gonna find this. Like, delete the PR, Clear out the branch. But, like, it's a weird thing about how communities work is you can kinda do stuff in public without people really carrying, and launch week is the celebration of the work. The,

hold it back.

I got even for our listener. It's it's our kind of one more thing that's secretly a really big deal.

Just trying to kind of give a day to celebrate, again, everything we just talked about, that community that supports us. So a couple of, kinda swaggy kinda swaggy dropping. Oh, I wonder if I can get you a hat in time. A hat. We're dropping some hats. Oh.

Oh, yeah. That's a great call. I mean, it's Your users run the code that they need.

I don't think it's an accident that some projects,

the announcement part is is kind of a a side effect. Nice. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Although when we did our century announcement,

Again, we go into one of those launch week planning. It's like, you know what? It feels like we're kinda getting close to that experimental thing you worked on last week.

cause some people to be concerned about the upgrades and maybe like, what do what are you guys doing to do major version upgrades To make them less, scary?

or you do them very quickly and then it's Lots of little changes, which is still super frustrating. Like, quite every month, I have to come back in here and make some breaking changes and be really nervous about this PR getting merged and going out to users.

The idea is every 3 months, we come together. What do we wanna do? You come up with, like, the best possible launch week you can imagine. Like, what are the 5 coolest things we could do? You then go that 3 month period, you go and work through that, and then you would celebrate it and announce it.

it always depends on what your goals are. For us with Astra, we wanted the most people to be using it, so everything has kinda come from that. We really wanted to actually Change the way people saw web development. That was very much an explicit goal, and everything came from that.

the image optimization people, of company and just, like, community. So, yeah, it seem maybe, like, half of that is, company. I I'd have to go back and check, to be honest. It all again, it's the thing. Like, it all kinda blurs into just core,

we had Friday, if we're gonna be delegated here. It

But yeah. Okay. More more on that. I have a reason to go back and check out our our Twitter. We've been watching all these things? I think we made the mistake. I think we should have Courtney on, A few others that I a little less regular on. But you just kinda try and, like, you miss stuff too. It's, I'm definitely not perfect. There's something about also information kind of competing for your attention where, like, if it's something really important, it does kinda have a way. Like, the view transit yeah. The view transitions API is a really good example of that. Like, it came to Through people

If you're if you're listening to this, what has happened? fairly pro JavaScript and Maybe a bit more skeptical of TypeScript, and it comes with its costs, I think, certainly.

So when we're doing the swag drop and the the century announcement that we joined century, we had to

Oh, yeah. I would love that. I'm I'm I'm a hat guy. I'm a I can tell you. We just we started this podcast talking about it. Love would love an Astro hat. So, Thursday

We We'd wanna keep testing it, but it's probably gonna be ready to go out. It's gonna be this breaking change. Okay. That's kinda how it seems to be going for us.

and try and kinda walk the line between both. So I'd say every 6 months is seems to be the cadence. That's not anything other than just, like, that seems to be what's happening.

By no means do you need to be a great marketer to work on something open source, and Plenty of projects have millions of users Yeah. And you've never even heard of them. It's a it's a certain type of project, I think, that benefits from it, and the others, it's probably a waste of time. It's true. Does curl even have a logo? Oh, it does. Okay. Exactly. It's got a logo. Wow.

the the release date. But we have a couple people who who go literally download the m p three and listen to it early.

company thinking that's,

Yeah. Nice. And what about Friday? Friday is still a secret. I actually, I'm not even gonna tell. I'll tell you guys off air, but, The idea being that the browser can actually control your navigation from page to page, which lets you

seemingly that a lot of open source

wait. So I don't know. I think sometimes maybe the judgment gets a little messy of, like, oh, if I don't have users, if I don't have a Twitter account or or swag, is is my project still good? And I do keep an eye on there. There's some mailing lists like JavaScript weekly and, invites.

And and now it seems like like open source is somewhat heading the same way. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple things there. The first thing I'd say is I don't think this is new. I think this has always been true that the people It's much more HTML first. It's really lightweight, and it's, really fun to use. And you still get to bring your favorite UI framework, so you still get to bring React or Salt review. Beautiful. Yeah. And also one of the things I think that draws a lot of people initially to Astro is that,

10 years ago where people thought, like, can I just be a developer? Do I have to tweet and blog and Go to conferences and do all this hula focus on where we can help and, and building it for you where That makes sense. Yeah. And people are probably a lot of people stumble upon images and they they say, like, why can't I just use image tag and put the source to actually triggering a full page reload. So when we got pushed in the history API, That's when we started to get like, we had it for a while, but it it didn't catch on until frameworks started to implement it. And then it's as simple as writing a link tag Or even just an anchor link in some frameworks, and you click on it, and it will just do the magic for you. And I think that this is the next do the magic for me thing, which is I'm gonna just render out my HTML.

to have to be a developer. I don't want to do that. I want to write code.

We try I'm I'm the most important person in your life. Got it. Awesome.

for her 3rd episode before, What so okay. So it's it's launch launch week for you guys. And the Monday

HTML still doesn't really have a logo, does it? I mean, it's got that the or CSS doesn't have a logo. CSS had, like, the CSS 3 had the 3 inside of a badge. Let's see if it fills up. Are kinda tired now. Even h t h the HTML five logo is kinda tired now. We're Super tired. Yeah. Later. We get it. It's fine. We were doing our redesign for level up tutorials. We had all the different badges of all the different logos for the tech. And then when we hit CSS, we were just like, what do we even what do we even do for that? Do we make our own? We, like, invent something? Like, it was such a a weird thing to look at some of the older ones. We just made our own, but it was, like, Very frustrating because it was like, I guess, we're definitely not using the CSS three one. Speaking of threes here, a nice little transition with Astro three. You guys are doing a big version number change, like a major version release. Like, I I wanted to ask you about, like, your thoughts on

But you can announce it 1 week into that, 3 months, like, whatever it is, It can kinda go out. That's the interesting thing about how communities work. Like, org to an org where people are, You know, working on a bunch of different things, or has that process been smooth? Has it been, like, a big learning experience for you? For me, personally, definitely. I think for the team, it's felt fairly organic. Just, Yeah. Like, it's like any open source project or software project I've ever worked on. You kinda constantly wanna do more.

also, I don't think that's always the goal. Like, I love just building software, and it doesn't have to go out and get a lot of users. In fact, after running after, like, I'd rather not have any users on any of the things I have built, like, building for yourself is still a super valid, saying that on Astro only exists because we came along, I'd say.

maybe 5,

This this is our 1st time having some sleuths. So Yeah. I am curious about your thoughts on and we,

Thursday is our community day. So there's a couple of, small All our announcements are really cool blog post about how we do internationalization,

it's all fairly, like, you know, that's the nice thing about a launch week. And, actually, I'll give a shout at super bases, the first people I've seen really Talk about this and blog about it.

having a release date and sticking to it,

I I think it's it's

we we usually have, I think between, like, 5 10 people sneak ahead episodes, meaning that we'll put the episode in the repo With a link to the m p three, but, obviously, it doesn't go live until

The things we love about it is it's not like, alright, like, Here's how we need to break it up exactly. Here's the super complicated, like, everything has to go out. Like, it's really lightweight. It's basically just everyone at that moment deciding what they wanna do and then committing to it.

have lots of users and some don't have, many at all. And, to develop important than your wife. Incredible. On camera, on recording this cut.

radar for upgrade paths? Yeah. I we were just talking about that in Discord. I would love To see. And I don't even think I think it has to be Astra specific, like, understand that. We definitely understand that, and I think it's something we,

why it couldn't fix it or whatever. But any anytime it would you know, the the comments that it left And the work that it did were both very clear, and it worked. So if you ran the code mod and your whole site wasn't just working immediately, thorough. Have you thought about, like, code mods? Is that a a thing that's on, Do you wanna go into some details about, like, how that happened and and maybe what are the benefits now of having a hosting partner for Astro? Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. That was our our Monday release, and Guillermo was kind of teasing this a little bit, but the Monday announcement was a partnership yeah, you you said you are polyfilling, so Safari and Firefox Firefox will be using the same API, and then it's just going to just work for users? Yeah. It's kind of the beauty of the fact that the JavaScript API is there.

I haven't seen anyone do it really right yet. Yeah. You know what? One of the things I think, I I don't know if you were, We avoided, like, the Ipads or or phones

anybody's

3 that it was 2 days away, and we're just like, oh, what about this breaking chance? Like, no. No. No. If it's existed this long, it can wait till the next one. Yeah.

6 months means nothing's really huge. We haven't made giant breaking changes.

And they did a code mod for that. Yeah. And it was probably one of the better code mods I've ever used because

I think they actually have a new major version coming up soon as well, so we're gonna try and coordinate with them on that. Yeah. Beats great. If anyone doesn't know it, it's like a Builder bundler similar like webpack or or roll up, styles. Yeah. Serverless.

if it couldn't fix Something it would leave a comment in telling you,

Into that the world pre one version 1 of SvelteKit, they had made a major change to,

Won't get in for this launch, but, like, there's so many cool ideas here, and I don't think anyone,

You knew exactly where to go and what to do. It wasn't just like, you're you're screwed. Yeah. I I remember that was a huge change at the time and, like, fairly close to their one of the whole. World. But they did that. I like, I never hear anyone talk about that anymore. I think they did a really good job with that. Yeah. Clearly, in retrospect.

the idea of our upgrade guide by going step by step could be a tool where it's just like, alright. The next thing I'm gonna check for is this thing. Good luck. It doesn't affect you. On to the next one or, like, oh, it does affect you. We found 3 places to go change. We're gonna wait here. Like, I actually would love. It's like a personal we have a hackathon Coming up that we might be running, and I might go and build that.

That's always the worst thing now that 3.0 is

congratulations

I don't know. Piece of paper. That kid. Alright. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it, and we'll catch everyone later.

What about shameless plugs? Anything you wanna plug? Any anything that we didn't hit with Astro that you wanted to to drop? In fact, like, I you know, it's one of those things I think people have been using, like, native in native app development. Right?

As a part of the launch I've been super busy, so I don't have any time for, like, video games or or movies or fun. But one thing that I just got very excited about was, Factorio just announced a new, expansion

Ace.

that I could just look at for hours. This thing is so cool. That is that game is also, like, the open source of video games where, like, they, I think, have just been working on that for, like, what, maybe 7 years now, And just consistent updates. You buy it once and that's it, and, like, there's this whole community energy behind it of mods and people. Like, I think that post was at the top of Hacker News. Like, the The love for that game is so real. It's cool. Yeah. I I,

No. I mean, there's so much going out this week. Just, yeah. Check our Twitter if you wanna stay, up to date on all the latest. That's, Astro dot. I'm sure it'll be in the show notes. Astro dot build is the full spelled out, handle. And, our Discord community is awesome if you wanna get involved with Astro in any way. Contributing and just hanging out with us on Discord.

or drop a review if you like this show.

No.

We should get some, like, We should get some sweat. I'll trade you a hat for a hat. Yeah. Three x hat or something. You could be the, only one. I'm just gonna make my own hat with, like, a Sharpie and, another baby that is coming into this world, which is Astro 3 point o.

Head on over to syntax.fm

more hours into that than I care to admit. But, yeah, very excited about that expansion. There It's based off of this one that I think takes 600 hours to compete. There was complete, there was a mod, and they've kind of, I think, stripped it down to a 100 hours to complete, which is still insane, but, having to ship a JavaScript app to To power your site. So it's still browser navigation. It's still server rendered HTML, but the browser has this new API which lets you hook into that

I've avoided really diving into it because I know how much I played the 1 on my iPhone that I will. Yeah. Oh, avoid that. Avoided that one last night. On this thing.

on being the 1st 3rd time guest.

That's aster.build as the website slash chat as the URL.

No. I I played to death a game on the iPhone that was like it was like builder or something that was you can write it in Svelte if you wanna write it in or or view or anything. Right? And that's just that's such a,

Sick. Well, thanks so much for coming on, and,

And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player

A couple of people were like, I don't know how, like,

The nice thing about our open source sponsorship, it's all public, so you can go and check this out. It's $5,000 a month that they support. I think our total sponsorship is now run up to a 150 AstroX.

Really hard to do that That level of investment, with just open source sponsorship alone. We after you came on last time, like, I'll I'll be straight up because this is a straight up show.

Astro can survive. Right. Like, there was some talk of maybe themes. Like, we specifically asked you last time. We Like, how does Astro make money?

wall of

Maybe not fear, but, like, I think anxiety about, like, what is sustainable open source? Does it have to be a company? Can it exist?

with Vercel. Right? Exactly. Or you have a hosting company. That's that's a very popular one as well. So it's interesting to see, and I'm I'm glad to see it, that,

or you can like like Yours, you have a partnership

Yeah. I I think so. Vercel is sponsoring the project. They're fantastic. It is definitely not an amount that lets us build, you know, a

Straight up with Wes and Scott. But,

wait. Is that our new, like, our new angle, Scott? Yes. Straight up. Joe. We're we're out of the skies.

And we're, like everyone else, just trying to figure that out.

in this work because of how many individual sponsors there are. It's it's pretty incredible. Oh, and we can go super deep on It's like the whole idea of how we run our community is that it is an open covenant. So anyone can come in,

contributing sponsors like you do, And, this episode is brought to you by We're just trying to do the good default. Beautiful. Nice. Let let's keep going here on features. Any anything else we add? I at least we'll start it. I don't know if I'll finish it. Yeah. I'm looking at the blog post announcement for it, and there's a really amazing animation, to grow

somebody who does make money like Vercel can then take open source projects under their wing. And I'm assuming that's how it works. Right? Like, they pay you money, and you say use Vercel? Yeah. So there so oh god. There's so much here. I I I think something that's really interesting about this moment too is what's going on with Terraform

And it's it's such a tricky thing when, like, you build an open source project that

a year a 150,000 a year.

isn't directly tied. And some of the options are, you can sell themes, you can get bought by Shopify,

We had a we had a couple of people

Do you wanna give A quick rundown about when Astro 3

But, yeah, definitely, 1 to 2 was pretty tricky. 2 to 3 was was not as tough. Although, it all is it's all a

A sleepy blur at this point.

that's gonna be making a Grand entrance when this 2 baby comes home.

with, you know, challenges of 1 while the other one is, can be easily animated

How was number 2 for you, Wes? 1 to 2, we had them really close together, like Like,

me. Fast forward a year too, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, good luck. I I'm really excited for you. That's a special time. Right? Alright. I got a yeah. I got a picture of a, push it. You you you're it's like it feels like much more of a commitment than, oh, just roll it back if It doesn't work type of deal. Yeah. Yeah. Snowpack always had that trouble as well. How do you feel about working on a a framework

Not trying to get you into trouble.

the we've avoided the iPad for the most part, but I'm sure That's not super responsive.

man, we gotta bust out the phone right now. Put on some Bluey at the restaurant so that we can get through this meal.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The hard part about 2 is I don't I don't know what your your distance between the first two fright was, but for us, it was like you were just Starting to feel like you're catching up on some of that sleep, and then you get hit with the the no sleep training. Yeah. It's like, oh, no. You don't know what not being Well, rest it actually is until you have. Yeah. Yeah. And it's definitely a lot harder to deal

when going out to restaurants for for so long. And then at some point, you're just like,

No. No. No. She's actually scheduled to come on the show, and she was scheduled to come on before this episode. So that was a it was a Funny, little tight call here. Gotta get work on that stretcher.

That is, it is it's not confirmed in that regard, but thank you, Fred.

Yep. Yeah. That's that's a 100% Using rack components. What you're saying? You know what? I didn't even think to look. I just saw it after. I got excited, and I closed the browser and did a dance. Let me know. I know what you can say. Celebrated.

You will also have a a new baby on the way. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. I,

Has the needs of a baby. Yeah. We've avoided

and Snowpack considerably.

Astro was a thing. We talked about Pika

[email protected], Well, Sentry has your back. Use the coupon code tasty treat, all lowercase, all one word, and you'll get 2 months for free.

I didn't realize I'm a 3 time I'm the 1st ever. That's never happened before.

Okay. After that extended intro,

I will have to confirm or I'll have to confirm that before I I set that in stone here.

the perfect place to track all of your errors and exceptions. Maybe you're picking up a new platform

and then Astro 2, Yeah. Right.

Welcome, Fred. How's it going, my man? It's going beautifully.

and then here we are now.

But, yeah, the 1st time we talked to you was even before

Like Astro. You listen to this. You say, I wanna write some Astro, but you, aren't in aren't experienced with it quite yet. So you make a couple of mistakes here and there, ship them to production.

You know what? Has Courtney been on 3 times? My wife may have been on 3 times, but I think this you are definitely the first, And Astra doesn't. And I I think that's one of the things that really sets you apart is that

And I do want to just I do want to to clear this up. Courtney has been on the show twice. Okay. So So confirmed.

It's very nice of you to bring that up for me. The the docs Releasing a major version considering, you know, last time we talked to you is version 2, version 3. It's it's not like it was no time, but it you know, it's pretty quick. Do you do you get concerned that that major version will,

rights or privileges in our community you get by being hired by the company versus,

Yeah. Custom custom spot and custom built. Yeah. Okay. So since we are listening or, you know, the viewers will be listening to this in the future after your launch week here, Let's let's go step by step. So we got Wednesday is gonna be the 3 point o launch. What what's going on Thursday, or what has happened already on Thursday?

open source. But, yeah, we're super lucky to have the contributors we have. Yeah. Was gonna ask, like, how do you ship so much? But I I feel like that's probably it it feels like really great. Is is Launch Week you something you do every year? Is that like a annual initiative? Yeah. It's actually every 3 months. So we, if there's any part of, like, data loading in SvelteKit,

Yeah. Don't think lightly. How many how many people are currently working on Astro on, like, a day to day basis? So I have to check. I think our core maintainer team is about Fourteen people now, SPA,

one of the things we're actually getting ready to announce, so our time tomorrow, this will be Tuesday of the launch week, That early integration though, yeah, that was much more we kinda tried to do everything. We're kinda curious what people wanted out of images. We did Cropping. We did aspect ratio fixing. We did background fill if you've cropped it in some way. Like, there was a lot going on there.

So I think you just naturally kind of fill the space with with stuff to do. But, yeah, it's been a while since I've coded anything myself on the on the project. I'm fairly now Helping everyone stay, you know, focused, prioritized. I'm I'm the steward of the project is now the kind of open governance rolling. That's a a full time job for sure. I was gonna it's it's so funny. I was on your docs, and I was gonna ask you, like, what what is the docs built in? And, you know, I was gonna ask you some interesting questions about that. So,

contribute, become a part of the community, and eventually become a core maintainer, which is Literally, like, higher than like, there's no extra whether it's a marketing site or a blog, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I think the good idea is make it through. I figured it out. I asked Chad GPT. It's the vast spat.

Sharing it on Product Hunt, getting out there, like, that's our docs team has just been, like, crushing that, and that's something that we couldn't have done, Fun fun is definitely a word. It's definitely, Oh, god. It's, I mean, doing anything with images at scale gets really tricky. I I think our the way we walk the line is trying to do enough that for small sites, it's essentially invisible. For large sites, you do wanna think through that kind of stuff Or use a hosting platform that supports, I think that kind of scope grows naturally as the people can kinda come in to fill it. So saying no is still something you have to do, but, like, And it turns out that made it a kind of difficult. Users didn't really expect a lot of that cropping. Like, I give you an image why is it different on the page. I wanna do CSS to kind of restyle this, but now it's actually cropped based on the defaults.

internationalization, We should circle back to that because it's actually something that I was really curious to hear your all's thoughts on about where that exact thing about, our architecture takes us. I'll I'll get to in a little bit, but I really wanted to hear your thoughts because it's a a fairly new, 5 10 person team around this project.

if you come through the company versus the community. So it's it's a really interesting model. I don't know if I've seen anyone do it. We're we're still figuring it out, but it's been fairly I don't wanna talk about it.

We built it for that reason, and now It's a way to build websites,

We actually haven't jumped it, so it's still the custom build. But essentially, everything in Starlight is inspired and and

being part of your launch thing. What what is this built in? I mean, you said it's built in the asteroid's a template, but, like, what what UI framework is this Yeah. I actually realized I just I misspoke. It is actually a custom framework. The relationship goes the other way. We basically, after 2 years of working on the site, realized, like, there's a lot of good. We actually had a docs theme. It was one of, like, the first 5 we launched. Like, when you use Astra, check out the docs theme. And what happened was that that Stagnated, and our doc site just went, like, Crappy old open, theme and our beautiful dockside. Trying to flip that where there's now beautiful theme, and then we're just in the play implementation of that.

It's the thing that we use for our own docs called Starlight.

and that's a mix of happening on the page. It's essentially like turbo lengths if you've used that, but totally built into Astro and and designed for Astro, or ImageX or Vercel, and, like, they don't support all this crazy stuff. Like, why did you why did you do this? You've made it very difficult. So,

from, you know, being a smaller

And now what Starlight is this project is basically trying to take the best of that and bring it into the community. So instead of having you feel that I think if you go through our Discord, if you go through our Twitter, like, it is such a community vibe, which I think really fits well with a framework which is Touching so many people's work, you know, it's the directing you interface. But I think that's why we're able to collect sponsorship where an MPM package might not be able to our JavaScript library. Like, It's a very personal experience working with a framework, and I think,

back when we were, you know, 3 people, 4 people, 5 people.

I mean, snowpack, Maybe I'm over exaggerating that. It's something that, like, means we now could and can from open source funding

So, yeah, it's it's just different parts of the stack. Like, we love being able to build on top of it, couldn't do without them. But we also then end up kinda being this, like, layer on top.

flagging things, but it was

Oh, I have a question. Last time we talked, a tree fell on your freaking house. That's What happened to the whole time? No wonder oh, god. That sucks.

More fun, I guess, so to say.

Different set of challenges and different set of, user expectations.

Making it not

I don't think there was ever, like, a huge master plan there, but I do think that that was, work has been visible for the last. Actually, funny enough, the Vercel announcement blog post was sitting in our repo and, get that all basically handled by Vercel, not as a part of your build, not as a part of your, your runtime.

I'd say more rewarding maybe. Yeah. I I think it is more fun. The,

Oh, no. No. No. We're as you can tell, we're happily in a in a new spot, but, man, it's been a tough year. Man, a tree. We just had a crazy storm last night, Wes, and I was driving through the neighborhood. And I saw, like, 3 or 4 trees down, and I was just, oh, shoot. I hope nobody's,

But the way it bundles things changes, and, like, sometimes you gotta be it's one of those things where it's, like, 0 effort to upgrade, but then, like, you really wanna go through the page and make sure nothing broke, it's kinda using like an SMM plus like anything else, any other asset in your, code base, and then you place it in a image component, a special image component that we provide to you. And we do the work to then make sure that that gets optimized based on the height and width of that component.

Yeah. Yeah. Scary.

Like,

definitely not, not painless either. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's always a pain if you do a big refactor, then you gotta,

nobody's house got cranked here because that, Man. We need to go back and pick up some mail, and it's like the house is still just like Provider, you still can. So we're we're basically trying to be lowest common denominator.

Nuxt, I think.

in my experience, it's I'll take that over, like, you know, a huge break and change where you have to, like, spend a week refactoring your code base, but, A, like, web app. I wanna actually do something more complicated.

you know,

Astro compared to working on a tool like Snowpack.

Does it feel like the work is,

Yeah. It's not a pain. Like, I had I had a whole course on Vite. Like, Like, not, of course, on Vee, but, like, I had the whole thing built with Vee. I had a couple plug ins, and I literally just updated Vee, and that was it. Like, no no breaking changes. There was. I don't know if there was any breaking changes at all or they were, like, that was the wrong way to go.

we wouldn't have stopped working on snowpack if we weren't confident that Vete was, like, clearly got taken off. Like, it was only because that existed. We said, hold on. We can actually, it's it's very old school, and it's kind of

it just just worked. And then all of a sudden, you had a couple new features, it was a bit faster. Yeah. Veed, in my experience, is one of those things where, like, it's a zero effort change usually because what it takes your code and it bundles it. Like, there's not really an API to Veed.

when you all said that there's a new major version of Vite, I was thinking, oh, Vite 4. And I even googled Vite 4, and it was like Vite 4 blog post. 4 is out. And I was like, what? When did that happen? I

A pain?

Remix and Next. Js are the only 2 I'm aware of that aren't still haven't made the switch yet. Yeah. I I really personally like working in Vite. And, Wes, you just said Vite 5, which is is wild to think because

they basically, like, tore it down to its, like, studs, and that's it. And they're like, how to re because It was during the middle of a rainstorm, so then it just tree fell on house and then rained for 2 more weeks. Like, the whole

What what are your thoughts on, like, text editors in the cloud first locally? I know that's, like, kind of a big push now. A lot of different tools are coming out in cloud text editor. Do you think that's something that we're finally gonna start To see being a a big push or do you think it's a little ways off still? Oh, that's a good question. I, I don't know.

is being released here to the audience depending on when they're listening to this, and then maybe we can dive into some of what makes Astro 3 a full major version release.

Currently launch week, so we're getting ready to launch a bunch of cool stuff this week. Wednesday, that's all still supported.

Yeah. It's a big new release with a couple of really interesting, Factorio is this awesome game. It's it's very much like programming the video game where you, like, Build a factory and, you know, you throw it together because you just need 1 or 2 parts, but then once you need, like, a 1000000 parts, you start to automate it with Conveyor belts, and it's basically like refactoring different levels of abstraction as you go. It's so much fun. It sounds so lame. It's so much fun.

major this is one of those ones where it's like and move on. So what else you got? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's That's the headline. There's a ton of just behind the scenes improvements that have been happening. Image optimization built in Astro is something we've been working towards for, like, 2 years. It

Astro three point o, that's August 30th. So by now, it's already out, but we just announced.

It's awesome, and Astro users want it. Like, it's come to us almost like with a bow on it. It feels like like you have to be open to seeing that, but then once it comes by your kind of your eyesight,

The Vercel, Oh, Astro, Svelte, and Tailwind stack. Nice. Ship it. I love it. Alright. Who's gonna tweet that 1st? Who gets the points?

I check out both of those pretty regularly.

oh, like, this API exists.

experimenting and showing us, like, it just happened that they were using Astro for it. So,

I sure hope you're hungry.

Hoo. I'm starving.