![]() This week we’ve got a launch week hangover, In-N-Out vs. Cheesecake Factory, and an AI that thinks it can take my job. Welcome to #95.
Shed those bits Astro’s launch weekAstro just wrapped up their first “launch week” (get it? cause Rockets? ok), where they announced the release of the the “Astro v1 Beta”, “SSR with Astro”, “Themes & Integrations” and some other stuff we already forgot about. In case you missed the last time we talked about Astro, the TLDR is they are on a mission to be the Jenny Craig of JavaScript, and help you shed those unwanted bytes. What does “Astro v1 Beta” do? Well, like DevRels, we’re still not entirely sure. But they are promising no more breaking changes (until v2). Astro also launched Themes & Integrations (AKA starter templates and plugins) and announced financial support for for the maintainers of some of their dependencies. The biggest announcement, however, was that Astro now has (experimental) support for Server Side Rendering. Previously, Astro only had support for SSG (static site generation), so dynamic data had to be fetched at build time or on the client from one of those “islands of interactivity.” With SSR, Astro now lets you build more dynamic websites without sacrificing performance. This new offering also includes API routes (for REST apis, user uploads, serving assets, etc.) — similar to Next or Remix. So what makes Astro different? For starters, Astro is BYOF (bring your own framework) so you can use React, Vue, Svelte (or all of them?) for your site. The team also claims that, unlike other frameworks, Astro is “designed to run on the server” - which is good enough evidence for us. Bottom line: Astro seems like an ideal fit for things like the aspirational rewrite of your personal blog, e-commerce sites, docs, and other websites that don’t need too much client-side JavaScript (which, they’d argue, is most sites). Call 1-800-94-JENNY today, and start losing those unwanted bytes.
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Dad, what are you doing? It’s launch week! Redwood’s launch weekRedwood didn’t want to feel left out, so they just had their own launch week too. Like Astro, this was one of those launch weeks that probably could’ve been an email (or blog post) — but hey, we all gotta find reasons to celebrate. The big news coming out of all the festivities was that after three years of work, RedwoodJS 1.0 was finally released. So what exactly is RedwoodJS, where did it come from, and what does its future hold? Let’s dive in.
Bottom Line: Redwood is focused on helping developers who want to build side projects and startups ASAP, rather than obsessing over all the technical details. It’s too early to tell how far that philosophy will take Redwood in the ever-changing hierarchy of JavaScript frameworks — but at least we know they probably won’t run out of money anytime soon. 🔬 Spot the Bug — Sponsored by PostHogPostHog is an open-source product analytics suite you can self-host. Heatmaps, Recordings, Funnels and more — all in a platform where you can build your own TypeScript plugins!
Cool Bits
🔬 Spot the Bug Solution — Sponsored by PostHogHistorically - in JavaScript, because we lacked the ability to have private class fields, we’d mark them with an underscore and hope for the best. Now, thanks to recently added Private Class features, we can now mark class fields as
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