Item — HN Reader

For those who are primarily javascript developers who want to go back to the basics, Astro.build is very nice. Ships plain HTML pages by default. Easy to progressively enhance with client-side interactivity if and where you'd like.

And for the client-side stuff, you get to pick how to tackle it: plain javascript, htmx, web components, react, vue, svelte, qwik... all enjoy first class support.

1 comments

Astro needs a better elevator pitch. I spent several minutes on the site, clicking and scrolling, but sample code was minimal and not easy to find. This is not effective marketing in 2023. If a developer has no idea what developing with your tech stack feels like after ~60 seconds, more times than not that developer will leave. Sorry, Astro sounds cool conceptually, but in this case I think brutally honest feedback is warranted.

For what it’s worth, I also think Django needs a better elevator pitch, but Django captured me in 2010. I might try pushing for a home page improvement. Django does have tenure and mindshare working in its favor, though.