A tale of two approaches: PWA & service worker vs SSG

For April’s LeedsJS we have two talks on two different approaches to web development. Steve will be talking about Progressive Web Apps and Service Workers while Tim will talk about Astro and Static Site Generation.

PWAs and Service Workers - Steve Milne
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) promise the best of both worlds—web simplicity with native app-like performance. At the heart of this experience lies the often-misunderstood (and occasionally mischievous) Service Worker.

In this talk, we’ll break down what PWAs actually are, how Service Workers work their behind-the-scenes magic, and why they’ve become such a powerful tool for modern web development. From offline capabilities and caching strategies to performance boosts and background sync, you’ll see how they can transform user experiences.

But it’s not all sunshine and lightning-fast load times—Service Workers can also introduce subtle bugs, confusing caching issues, and “why is this still broken?” moments that haunt even seasoned developers.

Vibe Coding a static site with Astro - Tim Lewis
A dive into using Claude code to develop stuff in a framework that the LLMs probably wouldn’t recommend. We’ll look at what is good and what is still a bit janky.