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Scaling DevTools

How Fred Schott built two open source projects with 20,000+ GitHub stars

Fred Schott is the founder of Astro.build and the Astro technology company. 

Astro is the all-in-one web framework designed for speed. Pull your content from anywhere and deploy everywhere, all powered by your favorite UI components and libraries.

Snowpack is a lightning-fast frontend build tool, designed for the modern web. 

Before this, Fred founded Snowpack 

  • What is Astro and what is it doing? 0:00
    • Fred introduces himself and talks about astro.
    • Fred explains what astro is and what it does.
  • What’s changed in the web over the last 10 years. 2:20
    • The last decade has been defined by full stack javascript.
    • Astro is a server-first HTML rendering.
  • Astro’s unique model of building an open source company. 4:51
    • Building a sustainable company around an open source project.
    • The astro technology company model.
    • How Fred got started in open source.
    • What Fred worked on before astro.
    • How Fred got started in open source software.
  • Pika was the first project that I really sunk my teeth into. 11:15
    • Pika was the first project Fred really sunk his teeth into.
    • Building snowpack and
  • Why is it so bad to create a slack channel for your open source project? 14:00
    • Stop creating slack communities for open source projects.
    • The importance of community
  • What it’s like at the beginning of an open source project. 16:26
    • The first users are essential for an early-stage open source project.
    • The power of responding quickly to feedback from the community.
    • The first version of astro
    • The spirit of open source and the importance of licencing code.
  • The importance of having fun working on something that’s your own. 22:29
    • The drive to just build it.
    • The importance of having fun working on free software.
    • The psychology of over-architecture.
  • The importance of dog-fooding and how to use it. 26:13
    • Dog fooding projects, how to build a tool for someone to use by seeing what they are doing.
  • How do you get people to use the tool if they’re not already using it? 29:16
    • Finding a real use case for snowpack.
    • How to approach feedback from users.
    • Using a Github repo to test new changes.
    • Prioritising what to work on.
    • Death by 1000 paper cuts.
    • The importance of listening to users for feedback.

Links:

  • Fred's Twitter https://twitter.com/FredKSchott
  • Astro https://astro.build/
  • Snowpack https://www.snowpack.dev/
  • 5 Things I Learned Building Snowpack to 20,000 Stars https://dev.to/fredkschott/5-things-i-learned-while-building-snowpack-to-20-000-stars-b9d
  • 6 More Things I Learned Building Snowpack to 20,000 Stars (Part 2)
    https://dev.to/fredkschott/5-more-things-i-learned-building-snowpack-to-20-000-stars-5dc9

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