Delaney Gillilan
X: https://x.com/DelaneyGillilan
Datastar: https://data-star.dev/
GitHub: https://github.com/delaneyj

Wookash Podcast
Show links: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lukasz-sciga
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7tExkDJcI6vvmpCguX8Ygd
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wookash-podcast/id1683109481
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9J9u3apteD0EuFjzRpt71w
RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/dd7643a4/podcast/rss
X: https://x.com/wookash_podcast

Chapters:
00:00 Let’s Launch This Ship!
00:22 Not Your Usual Journey
09:12 Where Does His Experience Come From?
12:33 Datastar - Making Web Dev More Sane?
27:47 Core Philosophy
41:34 Learning Datastar: Concepts & Features
01:01:55 How Does Datastar Look Now?
01:19:57 Do Not Sugarcoat Stuff
01:31:25 What Does He Do Now?
01:40:05 Bye Bye!

Game Engineering Podcast

Delaney Gillilan, creator of the Data Star framework, shares his unconventional path from circus performer to performance-focused web developer. He argues that modern web development has gone badly wrong by layering JavaScript on top of what should be a declarative hypermedia system. His framework, Data Star, is a 10KB no-dependency library that leverages native browser capabilities — HTML data attributes, built-in compression (Brotli/Zstandard), and SSE streaming — instead of reimplementing them in JavaScript. He contends the fastest thing you can do in a browser is send it plain HTML strings, and that SPAs fundamentally recreate browser functionality unnecessarily. He discusses the origins of Data Star as a fork/reimagining of HTMX with a plugin architecture, its signals system, SSE-based streaming updates, and real-world migrations showing 30-300x startup improvements and 40x network savings over React apps.

Delaney Gillilan on Why Modern Web Needs Less