Astro, is it amazing or just overrated?
I am mainly a Backend Developer, so why am I even talking about Astro? Well, even if I specialized in Backend I am still a web developer at the end of the day. And that means I have to know even if it is just a little about Frontend. Anyways, as many others of my kind I also hate the overuse of javascript. I may write about it another day. I like simplicity, and many times javascript frameworks are not needed at all.
However, sometimes you just have to make the trade off. You need a simple site, for documentation, a blog, or something like that. You want to keep it simple using just HTML, CSS and vanilla Javascript, but it takes too long to build… You want to build it fast, so you use WordPress or other no code tool, but it is slow and it is not that pretty… Then you decide to use a Javascript framework, and it looks amazing but the page is now so bloated with Javascript it makes you nauseous.
Over the last year I have heard about this magical framework to build content centered websites called Astro. In youtube many people recommending Astro, I was like is it that good? Never really paid attention to it. Until one day I was making a really simple website with pure HTML and just Tailwind to style it.
The little project was a success, and didn’t took that long. But there were times when I thought, there must be an easier way to do some stuff. A lot of repetitive tasks and code, I thought there must be somewhere a framework that has the modularity of the Javascript frameworks, but that compiles the code into static HTML. And when some days later I finally read in detail about Astro…
It was exactly what I wanted. And what I needed. Did the tutorial one night and the next day tried to remake my little project entirely in Astro. It was so much fun, fast and clean. I couldn’t believe it. Of course there were a couple of things I didn’t like, about their bundling process. I understand there are trade offs, and in the case of Astro I found the trade offs so insignificant, that I regret not looking into it before.
It has been a long time since any framework impressed me, I can’t imagine myself creating another static website without using Astro, it is just AMAZING.