Astro 2.0, Island Architecture, and React with Fred K. Schott

Astro 2.0 is launching new exciting features and it’s setting the bar for HTML frameworks. What makes Astro unique in web development and what are its future possibilities?

Fred K. Schott, CEO of the Astro Technology Company, says it’s all in the framework’s content focus and island architecture. For Fred, the aim is to have a tool that's HTML-first but still sprinkles in interactivity and allows developers to bring in components from other frameworks. They focused on solving the problem of sending a full JavaScript application to power a mostly static site. The attention to developer experience paid off and is one of the reasons Astro is creating waves in the developer community.

In this episode, Fred talks with Chuck and Robbie about how Astro uses an HTML-first approach to create content-focused websites, the latest features of Astro V2, and the trend of blindly using popular frameworks like React.

Key Takeaways

• [00:21] - An introduction to Fred K. Schott.
• [03:19] - A whiskey review: Pinhook: Artist Series Release No. 2 Whiskey Nicking.
• [19:07] - The challenge of creating forms in Astro vs. other platforms.
• [23:32] - React’s strengths and weaknesses.
• [30:55] - What makes Astro unique?
• [44:25] - Fred’s favorite HTML element.
• [47:57] - Fred’s hobbies.

Quotes

[02:36] - “Someone once described Astro as the first web framework that’s HTML first without hating developers for not using HTML, and I always resonated with that.” ~ Fred K. Schott

[26:12] - “I think you can’t talk about React without talking about where the web was at that point. We had a template in two different code bases, two different languages, it was a mess. And that’s the world that React came in and kind of saved us from.” ~ Fred K. Schott

[31:38] - “What makes (Astro) unique is our content focus. We talked about, you have one Solid component that’s a form and otherwise a mainly static site, that’s exactly where Astro shines.” ~ Fred K. Schott

Links

• Fred K. Schott
• Fred K. Schott Twitter
• Fred K. Schott LinkedIn
• Astro
• Astro Discord
• Astro Twitter
• Astro 2.0 Details
• Astro Content Collections
• Astro Hybrid Rendering
• Jack Forge
• Twitter
• Hot Ones
• Kent C. Dodds
• Pinhook: Artist Series Release No. 2 Whiskey Nicking
• Maker’s Mark Bourbon
• React
• Ember
• YouTube
• TikTok
• SolidJS
• Svelte
• Tailwind
• Josh Collinsworth
• Facebook
• JQuery
• JSon
• Vue
• National Geographic
• NBC
• Ryan Carniato
• Nuxt
• Gatsby
• The JS Party Podcast
• WordPress
• Next JS
• Second Life
• SimCity
• Ben and Jerry’s
• Snowpack
• Polymer
• ChatGPT
• Zach Leatherman
• 11ty
• Netlify

Connect with our hosts

• Robbie Wagner
• Chuck Carpenter
• Ship Shape

Subscribe and stay in touch

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• Whiskey Web and Whatnot

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