Putting Astro on a Rocket for Mars 🚀

Astro: not quite out of the stratosphere

I built the Lenten Reflections site originally in Astro, but over time, the bugginess proved too much to deal with.

The docs were insufficient, and their confusion reflected confusion in the project about how to manage common framework issues, such as scoping of styles. HMR was also buggy, further complicating work on styles. “Is a style change not being reflected in my development env because of a scoping issue, or because HMR bugs require me to save a file twice and then manually refresh?” is not a question you want to find yourself asking when working on a project.

Back in the arms of SvelteKit

I ported the site into SvelteKit, another not-yet-out-of-beta but less buggy framework. The best part? Less bugs = easier development.

I was also able to see my detour into learning the backend finally paying off. This time around using SvelteKit I was better able to understand the purpose of endpoints, and used endpoints to serve content to the frontend.

Life & Death Intervenes

My dad fell in the nursing home and hit his head, and since he was already in hospice, his chances were not good. I went up North to sit with him at his bedside. I watched for a week as his body shut down. I sat praying, hand on his chest, as he drew his final breath and died.

Few things in life are so real as dying. It reminded me a lot of when my daughter was born. In both cases, you are secluded in a cloistered hospital cell. You realize that some things in life just happen, and there is little anyone can do to hasten or prevent them. Children are born when they are born. People die when their bodies die. All you can really do is be there and witness it, open to the moment, and in a spirit of compassion for those doing the labor of birthing or dying.

It certainly makes web development feel very trivial. So much human life is given to making glorified brochures and apps that could be replicated on a piece of paper in a fraction of the time it takes to create them.

What’s next?

Well, I’m trying to get back into the spirit of building things on a computer with lines of code. I read a twitter thread recently that suggested that portfolio projects are pointless, and that I should be contributing to open-source projects instead, so I’m going to explore that. I’m also going to keep working on SpookySets, because I like and still use that app, so I think it actually has at least some tiny value.

Onward and Upward.