Dan Le Chambre

Crafting Delightful Digital Experiences

Choosing Astro

This isn’t another “I moved my blog from Last Month’s Hottest Framework™ to This Month’s Hottest Framework™”. That’s not my bag. This is just a quick reflection on how I came to choose Astro for this particular site. I have no desire to rebuild every time something new and shiny comes out.

When it came to picking the tech for this site I had three goals in mind:

  1. I wanted to be able to use Three.js for a super fancy header.
  2. I wanted to be able to write my articles in Markdown - whether natively or with an easy conversion step.
  3. I wanted the tech to fit my use case, not make my use case fit the tech.
  4. See points 1 and 3; I basically wanted to be able to do whatever the hell I liked and experiment with whatever the hell technologies I wanted to without necessarily having to use something like CodePen or Stackblitz.

React is my bread and butter, in that it literally gets me the money I need to buy my bread and my butter. I’m productive with it, and I’m sure I could have had the site knocked up in an afternoon. But I would have felt like the proverbial man with the hammer. I did start out with Gatsby, but the GraphQL layer felt pretty painful, and then I found out it was basically abandonware (possibly unfair, but that’s the feeling I get).

Whilst pondering what to do, the latest instalment of my favourite newsletter dropped. It covered the release of Astro 2, which I’d not read much into up to that point. It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.

So, why Astro? They put it better than I can:

Astro is…

  1. Content-focused: Astro was designed for content-rich websites.
  2. Server-first: Websites run faster when they render HTML on the server.
  3. Fast by default: It should be impossible to build a slow website in Astro.
  4. Easy to use: You don’t need to be an expert to build something with Astro.
  5. Fully-featured, but flexible: Over 100+ Astro integrations to choose from.

So far it’s been great. I’m mostly just writing HTML and CSS like the olden days, and I love that later down the line if I want to add anything bonkers, Astro’s island architecture has me covered.