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