EdinburghJS Astro Islands and Robust Rendering

We held the EdinburghJS February Meetup last night. We had two talks and lots of socialising and networking. There was a nice mix of new attendees and regular faces. McGregor Boyall and KPV Lab sponsored the refreshments, keeping the meetup free and sustainable.

The first talk was from Joe Shambrook on Astro Islands (slides, source). Astro is the framework that I am currently recommending to new developers for their personal websites. You can get started quickly with simple HTML and CSS, add build or server rendering, and then add front-end interactivity using your framework of choice: React, Vue, Svelte, etc. Joe took us through a great demo of the various options for loading client-side scripts from various frameworks, and sharing state between them.

The second talk was from Phil Hawksworth who spoke about “Robust Rendering” (naming things is hard!). He took us through the various options for delivering code and content to users: build time, servers, the network edge, and client side. He showed a nice demo of how he archived his tweets (X’s’sss?) on his website, doing deferred static generation to achieve a quick build and a subsequent quick response.

The livestream video is available on the Scottish Technology Club YouTube channel and hopefully we’ll get edited versions of the talks produced soon.

I’m looking forward to March, where we will hear from Frances Maxwell (React Native/Expo) and Patty O’Callaghan (Tensorflow.js) at GlasgowJS and Daniel Roe at EdinburghJS