Episode description

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