Fred Schott is the founder of Astro.build and the Astro technology company.
Astro is the all-in-one web framework designed for speed. Pull your content from anywhere and deploy everywhere, all powered by your favorite UI components and libraries.
Snowpack is a lightning-fast frontend build tool, designed for the modern web.
Before this, Fred founded Snowpack
- What is Astro and what is it doing? 0:00
- Fred introduces himself and talks about astro.
- Fred explains what astro is and what it does.
- What’s changed in the web over the last 10 years. 2:20
- The last decade has been defined by full stack javascript.
- Astro is a server-first HTML rendering.
- Astro’s unique model of building an open source company. 4:51
- Building a sustainable company around an open source project.
- The astro technology company model.
- How Fred got started in open source.
- What Fred worked on before astro.
- How Fred got started in open source software.
- Pika was the first project that I really sunk my teeth into. 11:15
- Pika was the first project Fred really sunk his teeth into.
- Building snowpack and
- Why is it so bad to create a slack channel for your open source project? 14:00
- Stop creating slack communities for open source projects.
- The importance of community
- What it’s like at the beginning of an open source project. 16:26
- The first users are essential for an early-stage open source project.
- The power of responding quickly to feedback from the community.
- The first version of astro
- The spirit of open source and the importance of licencing code.
- The importance of having fun working on something that’s your own. 22:29
- The drive to just build it.
- The importance of having fun working on free software.
- The psychology of over-architecture.
- The importance of dog-fooding and how to use it. 26:13
- Dog fooding projects, how to build a tool for someone to use by seeing what they are doing.
- How do you get people to use the tool if they’re not already using it? 29:16
- Finding a real use case for snowpack.
- How to approach feedback from users.
- Using a Github repo to test new changes.
- Prioritising what to work on.
- Death by 1000 paper cuts.
- The importance of listening to users for feedback.
Links:
- Fred's Twitter https://twitter.com/FredKSchott
- Astro https://astro.build/
- Snowpack https://www.snowpack.dev/
- 5 Things I Learned Building Snowpack to 20,000 Stars https://dev.to/fredkschott/5-things-i-learned-while-building-snowpack-to-20-000-stars-b9d
- 6 More Things I Learned Building Snowpack to 20,000 Stars (Part 2)
https://dev.to/fredkschott/5-more-things-i-learned-building-snowpack-to-20-000-stars-5dc9
Episode 49
