Developing Astro with Firebase Studio
All my building with Astro is done in a cloud development environment thanks to Firebase Studio! No local development environment? No problem!
rainsberger.ca | Blog
Latest posts
Reads - May 3, 2025
Code and Coffee virtual conference, looking at open-source maintenance through a relationship lens, dev advocacy, reading the footnotes, and more!
IDX: my first impressions
"I learned to code on a Chromebook in online editors. My very first Astro project was a forked CodeSandbox of an Astro v0.12 (!) starter template. I have spent the last two years building several websites and maintaining the Astro documentation on Gitpod. Two months ago, I switched to IDX as my exclusive coding environment (and you're not going to believe what happened next...)"
Reads - October 6, 2024
Community building advice from FeverBee, sidebar navigation advice from Tom Johnson for large documentation sites, and more!
50 Docs tips in 50 days
It's 50 days until I turn 50! So I thought I'd celebrate with a different docs tip every day.
Developing Astro with Gitpod
From a 7 year-old Chromebook to an Android tablet to a Linux desktop... all my building with Astro is done in a cloud development environment thanks to Gitpod! No local development environment? No problem!
Stop writing docs. Start helping!
Good docs can be the difference between a happy, successful user of your project and ... a happy, successful user of someone else's project. But documentation is often a task left to people who don't feel comfortable writing it. This talk presented at ViteConf 2023 presents a new way to think about "writing good docs" and some action items that will immediately improve any existing…
The value of non-code contributions to open source
One of the most rewarding parts about leading Astro Docs is welcoming non-code contributors to open source! We still have work to do, but the open source community is slowly starting to realize (and capitalize on!) the value of writers, translators, designers, testers, content creators, speakers, community support members.
Astro's Community-Driven Docs
What community-driven means to Astro Docs.
Doc'ing the Docs!
A brief history of what's been going on in the Astro docs.
React to XElement in Astro: sBird to xBird
aFuzzyBear and I have started a community, build-in-public project where we take my React-in-Astro sBird app and recreate all the same functionality using XElement, natively in Astro! The first video is now up on YouTube.
Contribute to Open Source Docs via "Edit this page" on GitHub
Have you ever been reading documentation for an open source project and found a typo, or an out-of-date code example? If there's an "edit this page on GitHub" link, then you're only a few clicks away from contributing to Open Source and helping out a project!
Creating an Astro layout - screencast and transcript
This is a screencast and transcript of refactoring one of the basic Astro examples to create an initial BaseLayout component.
Creating individual tag pages in Astro via dynamic routes
Now that I'm on a roll with dynamic routing via getStaticPaths() in Astro, I'm checking the next item off my Astro blog wish list: pages to display blog posts by tag.
Adding an RSS feed to my Astro blog
One of the reasons I had delayed setting up an RSS feed for this blog is that Astro is still technically in beta, and many aspects of coding the site are changing right before my eyes! With everything else I was learning, I didn't want to have to re-learn this, too. But, in the spirit of accessible, self-hosted content, I started the new year by sitting down and cranking it out. Here's how I did…
Thinking in Astro, Coming from React
Astro sites allow you to use React, but they aren't React, themselves. Understanding the differences between React and Astro can help you get started more quickly, so here are some thoughts on how to think like an Astro-naut!
Getting started with React components in Astro
Yes, you can write and render your React components in your Astro page. But remember, Astro isn't React, and you might be getting error messages when you totally know your React component should work. It's not complicated to establish the Astro-React relationship, but you might not be used to doing these things. . .
Astro is a learner's paradise!
One of Astro's selling points has been that you can bring your own mix-and-match components... but I didn't really get the power of that as a learner until just now, listening to Fred K. Schott interviewed on devtools.fm
Rewriting a React Component as an Astro Component
I'd been using a lot of components in my Astro blog, but I realized that they were almost all React components, because that's what I know. So, I wanted to try reproducing some functionality by replacing a React component with a corresponding Astro component.
Javascript 5-pin bowling simulation in CodePen
When you code for @jbrains, you get 5-pin bowling coding assignments!