Resumability, and Why This Site Chose Astro

In August 2023 I wrote about Qwik and its big idea, resumability. I finished with: “There are some alternative frameworks looking to solve the same client-based problems, such as Astro. However, I see myself more aligned with the Qwik paradigm and their roadmap.”

My blog ended up running on Qwik City. In 2026, when I rebuilt it as this garden, I moved it to Astro. Here’s what I think now, and why I changed my mind.

What resumability is

Most frameworks that render on the server still have to hydrate in the browser: download the JavaScript for the page, re-run the components and attach event listeners before anything is interactive. On a large page that’s a lot of work repeated just to get back to where the server already was.

Qwik’s answer is to serialise enough state and listener information into the HTML that the browser can resume where the server left off, loading a component’s code only when the user actually interacts with it. A button’s handler arrives when someone clicks it, not before. Interactivity costs nothing until it’s used.

It’s genuinely clever, and the post was right to be excited about it.

Why this site moved to Astro anyway

When I turned the old blog into a knowledge garden, the question changed. A garden is almost entirely reading: notes, topics, a radar, a bookshelf. Only a handful of features need JavaScript: the graph, search, the skill library.

For that shape of site, three things mattered more than resumability:

• Content collections. Typed frontmatter validated at build time, for notes, ideas, radar entries, books and more. That’s the backbone of a site fed from my notes (How I Take Notes: Capture, Distil, Resurface).
• Islands. Ship zero JavaScript by default, and hydrate only the components that need it. For a mostly static site that gets you most of resumability’s benefit with a simpler mental model.
• The ecosystem. Markdown and MDX pipelines, remark plugins for wikilinks, image handling and static output all work out of the box.

Resumability shines for applications with lots of potential interactivity, much of which a user never touches. Islands shine for documents with a little interactivity. I was building a document.

What I’d tell my 2023 self

• Pick the framework for the shape of the product, not for the most elegant idea. Same lesson as Choosing Frameworks and Standards for 80 Sites, three years later.
• Migrations are cheap when content is portable. The old posts moved across intact, at their original URLs, because they were Markdown with frontmatter. The framework was the replaceable part.
• Hydration cost is still the thing to watch, whatever you use. Measure what ships to the browser.

I still think Qwik is one of the most interesting ideas in front-end frameworks. It just wasn’t the right fit for this particular site.

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Originally written in 2023 → What is Resumability? What is the Qwik framework