In this episode, Fran and Jeff talk to Fred Schott, the co-creator of the Astro framework. Astro is a newer JavaScript framework that focuses on creating super fast content-focused sites. There is a ton of love in the JS community for Astro, and we dig into Astro's origin stories and some of Fred's background with build tools. 

Astro aims to reduce complexity by offering a server-first, zero-JS by default experience for building sites. For WordPress developers who've done some work with PHP, Astro invokes a lot of that simplicity. Astro also doesn't ship a frontend framework by default, so you can use React, Vue, Svelte, or any other framework you want. We touch on some additional benefits of Astro as well:

• Islands architecture
• Client directives for selectively loading JS
• How Astro focuses on prioritizing content-focused sites

Fred shares with us some of the future goals of Astro and talks about how it fits into the community.

Astro Website

Astro Discord Server