Session Spotlight
One Framework To Rule Them All: Faster Websites With Astro
Monday, January 29, 2024 - 4:00 PM CST, for 1 hour.
Regular, 60 minute presentation
Room: Campsite 6
Let's talk about Astro, a relatively new framework for creating static or server rendered websites that is rapidly growing in popularity, and for good reason. We will cover how Astro lets you bring your own favorite JavaScript framework with their islands architecture (or even multiple frameworks at the same time) while still not shipping any JavaScript by default. And you will also learn how you can use Astro to quickly build and customize your personal websites, or your company's next engineering blog. Astro is great for static websites, but also supports server-side functionality. We will cover how you can enhance your projects with additional functionality, and we will integrate a backend-as-a-service platform (Appwrite) to store our data and provide other functionality to take our engineering blog to the next level. This talk will include a live coding session during which you will see how you can quickly customize and deploy an engineering blog for your company. The engineering blog will have features such as multiple authors, co-authoring, topics, and search functionality. I've prepared a custom Astro theme which you will be able to use after the talk to create your own personal or company engineering blog. This talk and the custom Astro theme are updated for Astro 3.2+, so we will also be taking a look at Astro's latest features.
Prerequisites
Some basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is expected but the talk is very much designed so that beginners can understand it
Take Aways
- What is Astro
- Why people love Astro and why you might want to use it
- Which (bigger) companies are already betting on Astro
- How to quickly build performant websites with Astro
- Customizing an Astro theme and deploying it to the internet (live coding)