Astro Weekly #11

Happy Tuesday, crew members!

As covered in our previous newsletter, Astro blew the doors off last Monday to start a week filled with incredible announcements, beginning with news of the $100,000 Astro Ecosystem Fund and of course, the release of Astro 4.0 on Tuesday.

But wait, there’s more! Astro had a few surprises still up its sleeve to conclude an extraordinary week, so let’s check those out!

This week in Astro ✨

Sentry joins Astro as an official partner

We’re gonna need a bigger rocket for where we’re heading. Astro has welcomed Sentry aboard as its Official Monitoring Partner.

Sentry is a self-hosted and cloud-based application performance monitoring & error tracking service that helps developers diagnose, fix, and optimise the performance of their code.

As part of this partnership, Astro and Sentry unveiled Spotlight — a new tool that enhances the Astro development environment by incorporating a robust debug overlay available as app in the new Dev Toolbar in Astro 4.0.

Spotlight seamlessly presents errors, traces, and significant contextual information directly within your browser during local development, meaning we have even fewer excuses for shipping bugs to production now.

One more thing… 🚀

Astro had a mic drop moment to cap off the week, sharing a short teaser of the highly anticipated Astro Studio.

Details on Astro Studio remain a close-guarded secret, but here’s what we do know:

• ❌ It’s not a web hosting company or CMS

• 🆕 It’s something entirely new to the web ecosystem

• 📡 A globally-distributed edge data platform

•  ✨ Available exclusively for Astro

• 🗓️ Public launch early 2024

Join the waitlist → https://studio.astro.build/

Astro Community 🧑‍🚀

Astro 4.0 recap 🙌

You may have heard, but Astro 4.0 was released last week. You can read up on all the new features in Astro Weekly #10, but if a video recap is more your jam, then James Q Quick has you covered.

Watch on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-cE4XFkwPM

Calculate PageSpeed Insights with Dev Toolbar 🚥

A standout addition in Astro 4.0 is the Dev Toolbar. While it already boasts several excellent functionalities, developers also have the flexibility to leverage its API for creating custom extensions.

Nick Bukovec was quick to get to work and released an awesome integration that calculates PageSpeed Insights directly from the Dev Toolbar.

GitHub repo:
https://github.com/buk0vec/astro-lighthouse

To get started in your project, simply run:

astro add astro-lighthouse

Note: Pagespeed Insight scores in astro dev should be used with caution. For the most accurate results, be sure to also run reports on your production build. Thanks to Nate Moore for pointing this out in the Astro Discord server!

If you have something awesome you’d like to share with the Astro community, you can reach me at [email protected] or via DM on X

AstroXtra 💫

What’s happening on Twitter X this week…

Direct link for web version:
https://twitter.com/jlengstorf/status/1732479371754303489

Astro Showcase 🌠

This week’s showcase perfectly demonstrates how Astro isn’t just for content-driven sites, it’s also a great choice for building dynamic apps — or in this instance, migrating from another framework such as NextJS.

DGM is an online diagramming app built with Astro, RoughJS, PlanetScale, DrizzleORM, and Tailwind CSS, and comes with a rich set of features.

The premium tier is launching soon, but you can use it free when working with local files, export your diagrams to PNG and SVG, save up to 10 diagrams on the cloud, plus access 30 days of revision history. Nice!

Other Astro projects in orbit 🪐

More great Astro projects worth checking out! ↓

Would you like your work to be featured in our Astro Showcase? Get in touch at [email protected] or DM me on X

Beyond the Astrosphere 🪐

What caught my eye outside of Astro this week…

• svgl — an open-source repository of some of the most popular SaaS and developer tool logos in SVG format

• Understanding Accessibility — an amazing resource to help web designers learn the basics of accessibility

• Tailwind Fold — VS Code extension which helps improve the readability of your code by automatically "folding" long class attributes

I’ll be back next Tuesday for the final Astro Weekly of 2023.

In the meantime, drop me an email at [email protected] or drop into my DMs on X if you have something of interest to share.

Have a great week, Astronauts!

– Nathan 🧑‍🚀