Episode #45: Astro Joins Cloudflare, Curl Drops OpenSSL QUIC, AI Can't Replace Developers
Astro is joining Cloudflare
Big news in web development this week: Cloudflare has acquired the Astro Technology Company, makers of the popular Astro web framework. Astro powers content-driven websites for major brands including Porsche, IKEA, and OpenAI. The good news for developers? Astro stays open source with MIT licensing and will continue accepting community contributions. All Astro employees are joining Cloudflare and will keep working on the framework. Astro 6 is launching soon with a redesigned development server powered by Vite’s new Environments API. This means your local dev environment can run in the same runtime as production, including support for Cloudflare’s Durable Objects, D1 databases, and AI agents. The framework has grown rapidly thanks to its focused approach: it’s built specifically for content-driven sites, renders HTML server-first for speed, and uses an Islands Architecture that keeps pages fast by default while allowing interactive components when needed. With this acquisition, Cloudflare is doubling down on making web development faster and more accessible for everyone.
More HTTP/3 focus, one backend less
Big news from the curl project this week! The popular networking tool is simplifying its HTTP/3 support by dropping OpenSSL’s QUIC backend. The decision? Performance and memory issues. According to curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg, OpenSSL-QUIC was struggling badly. Benchmarks showed competitor ngtcp2 transferring data up to three times faster, while OpenSSL-QUIC consumed up to twenty times more memory. Curl now supports just two HTTP/3 backends: ngtcp2 plus nghttp3, and experimental quiche support. This streamlines the codebase and focuses resources on backends that actually deliver. The change ships with curl version 8.19.0. For developers using curl with HTTP/3, the message is clear: performance matters, and curl is betting on leaner, faster implementations.
Why We’ve Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969
Here’s a pattern that’s been repeating for over 50 years. Since 1969, every decade has promised to replace developers with easier tools. COBOL would let business people write their own programs. CASE tools in the ’80s would generate everything from flowcharts. Visual Basic would make coding simple enough for anyone. Now it’s AI’s turn to make the same promise. But here’s what history teaches us: each tool genuinely helps developers work faster, but none eliminates the core challenge. Software complexity isn’t about typing speed or syntax—it’s about thinking through edge cases, security, integrations, and maintenance. As one developer puts it: “Software development is thinking made tangible.” You can’t shortcut that reasoning, no matter how good your tools get. AI will change how we work, but it won’t replace the judgment developers bring to complex problems.
Design Systems for Software Engineers
Ever wonder why enterprise software looks so polished? The secret is design systems. The Pragmatic Engineer breaks down how companies like Rubrik transform their UIs from “college project” to award-winning interfaces. It starts with a wake-up call—often from leadership noticing the product looks amateur. Building a design system is surprisingly complex. Just designing a button requires decisions on six key factors: color, text, height, border radius, shadows, and fonts. Then you need to consider hover states, animations, accessibility, localization, and mobile responsiveness. But the payoff is huge: faster delivery, higher quality, and that “premium feel” that justifies enterprise pricing. The article also covers how AI fits in. While AI can’t generate an entire design system from a prompt, it excels at writing unit tests and catching edge cases. For any company scaling past product-market fit, a design system becomes essential infrastructure.
Should CSS Be Constraints? Predictability, Edge Cases, and Better Mental Models
Why is CSS layout so frustrating? A researcher who wrote the first formal specification of CSS 2.1 layout weighs in. The problem isn’t that CSS is non-deterministic—it’s that the rules are incredibly complex. For example, text-align: center actually becomes left-aligned if the content is too wide. Why? So users can scroll to see overflowing text instead of it spilling off-screen where it’s unreachable. Some suggest replacing CSS with constraint-based systems, like iOS uses. But constraints have their own issues: layouts can be under-determined or over-determined, making debugging tedious and unpredictable. The real insight? Design is genuinely hard. CSS embeds decades of design wisdom into rules that handle edge cases most developers never think about. The solution isn’t starting over—it’s what CSS is already doing: providing better layout modes like Flexbox and Grid that match modern design needs better than the old text-centric flow layout.