Astro blew my mind

I decided to try out Astro today, and dear lord, was I blown away.

I wanted to bootstrap up a landing site for a potential service I'd like to run called Heimball, essentially a service that generates customized performance breakdowns for one's favorite baseball players. The idea is to provide it to content creators, amateur scouts, and any other hardcore fan who's interested in how their favorite players are doing.

A lot of the underlying software is already written, but I realized I'd never gone out and nabbed the domain, so I did just that. I thought about putting up a Next.js site like always, but then I thought "it's literally just a landing site, I'm not even adding a second page. Why not try Astro, that framework you've been hearing such awesome stuff about?"

The first thing that really blew me away was the CLI. Bootstrapping the project was absolutely delightful, because the Astro team had clearly put an incredible amount of effort into making the process absolutely painless, and really quite cute.

Once the project had been scaffolded and I was all loaded into VS Code, I popped open the terminal to start up the dev server and was wowed again. On my beefy M1 Mac, the initial build and startup was near instantaneous, coming in at under 25ms.

Building the site was a pleasure as well. As a first time user, I was able to immediately start making concrete progress, rather than fumbling around for 20 minutes getting a real understanding of the framework. This ease of use is impressive, but what really blew me away about this is that it could be this easy to use and still offer blazing fast speeds.

The deployment process was a breeze as well. I pushed a branch up to Github, and then hooked it up to Vercel. Surprise surprise, Vercel knew exactly what to do, and pre-configured the project to work perfectly with Astro. It was then just a matter of routing the domain to the new site, and it was done. It was far and away the fastest boostrap-to-deploy path I'd ever taken part in, and the developer experience along the way was second-to-none.