Episode description
This week we get a glimpse into the future of Svelte and SvelteKit! Rich joins us to talk about the new thing in town, SvelteKit, as well as what the future of web development could look like.
Some topics that we discuss:
- Release date
- SvelteKit vs Sapper
- Features
- Adapters
- Ideas about what is next
If you missed the talk at Svelte Summit check it out here.
Picks:
- Robot Vacuum
- OnePlus 8T
- SavvyCal
- Begin.com
Transcription:
[00:00:00] KA: Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of Svelte radio. I'm your host, Kevin, I run Svelte school. And today we have a very special episode, we have the creator of a Svelte, Rich Harris. But before he gets to introduce himself, we'll kick it off with our other hosts.
[00:00:19] S: Hey, I’m Sean, work at AWS on random stuff, including trying to get Svelte into AWS and that is an ongoing mission.
[00:00:30] A: Hi, I'm Anthony, and I'm the CTO of Biank. And also Svelte maintainer.
[00:00:35] RH: And I'm a graphics editor at the New York Times currently working on SvelteKit.
[00:00:42] KA: Whoo, cool. The new shiny thing before we get started, how are you? How's everything with the election and all of this stuff? How's the workload?
[00:00:50] RH: For me, thankfully, it's settling down. Last week was quite a busy week for everyone. Certainly in the graphics department at the times and probably in the organization as a whole. It's very difficult to avoid getting sucked into the madness. But you know, what is fun? There's no better place to witness history than from a newsroom, even if it is a virtual newsroom scattered around people's homes.
[00:01:10] KA: Something I didn't didn't appreciate about your election coverage is that you're actually spinning up visualizations fairly quickly based on what counties or states are in focus at the time. Like, there's some parts of this that you could not have prepared beforehand, right?
[00:01:26] RH: Yeah, there's some sleight of hand, you know, you prepare for a variety of different outcomes. But yeah, like, as soon as the results start coming in, the politics editors, and the graphics editors who are covering this, are bashing their heads together and trying to figure out what is the story. And then that kind of filters down to the people making the charts and maps. And we all come together, we analyze data, and we try and figure out what just happened. There is some infrastructure that's already built out, because you kind of know that people are gonna want to know which parts of the country swaying in one direction. But yes, a lot of it is kind of rapid response, data visualization.
[00:02:05] KA: So you've got Lego blocks for building visualizations that will tell you population, this area voted this way or whatever, you've got that sort of stuff?
[00:02:14] RH: Yeah, like you know that you're going to need a lot of demographic information about counties, like we know that the results are going to be coming in per county or in New England it’s per township, because they like to do things differently. And you just have all of the data that you might possibly need in a massive spreadsheet at a time. And then you can also plug it in to make something relevant.
[00:02:37] KA: Alright, so we're not here for the election. We're here for something that's more exciting.
[00:02:48] RH: That’s certainly, perspective
[00:02:51] KA: For sure. So we're going to talk about SvelteKit today. So before we dive in to the questions, what is SvelteKit?
[00:02:59] RH: SvelteKit is, in one way it's a successor to Sapper. And you could even think of it as Sapper 1.0, if you like. But in another larger sense, it's our kind of vision for the way that you should build Svelte apps in future. It’s something that we've been kind of talking about in a peripheral sense for a long time, we've been talking about how we can evolve Sapper to take advantage of some of the recent trends in front end development, particularly the rise of serverless. And more recently, the rise of unbundled workflows, which I'm sure we'll get into later. But it all sort of came to a head recently, you know, the pace of development on Sapper had hit a bit of a low, at least until Ben McCann really picked up the baton and started churning through issues. And people were getting a little bit frustrated, I think with the progress. And Anthony is one of those people because he uses Sapper very heavily in his job. At a certain point, we're like, “What if we just started from scratch?” Like the big rewrite, as opposed to trying to get all of these ideas into what was honestly kind of a watery codebase. I sort of proposed this very hesitantly in the discord thinking everyone was going to yell at me. And instead everyone was like, “Oh, yeah, let's do that.” And so that was sort of the germ of the idea. And then over the last, I guess, month or so, the idea turned into a prototype, and the prototype turned into a project with a name. And I was, I guess, reckless enough to announce it at Svelte summit as a thing that I was working on. And then at that point, it was like a de facto, this is what we're doing. Now. This is, this is it. So now the whole team is full steam ahead. We've got some new contributors as well, people who haven't previously been on the Svelte core team are helping us out. Andreas [inaudible] is one of them and Dominic who created Sleet helping out in the repo and it's actually looking good.
[00:05:00] A: I think that probably the alternate version of that story is that Rich claimed to going on holiday, he went on holiday, he came back a week later and SvelteKit appeared. And then we spent ever since bikeshedding the name.
[00:05:15] RH: I promise I didn't do it on holiday. I would have been very sad, I had a really nice break. And if I'd spent it in front of a laptop, I'd have been very unhappy with myself in trouble. It's just the way these things right, the first 80% of a project is you can build it pretty rapidly. But then once you start to get into the details, that takes the remaining 400% of the time. And that's the situation that we're in at the moment.
[00:05:15] A: The modified Pareto principle.
[00:05:41] KA: Obviously, I'm not so steeped in the history of Svelte as much as some other people here. But I feel like this is something that happens every now and then in rich land. This idea that a big rewrite would update just a lot of the core assumptions and change the design to something that is much more enjoyable. Is there like lessons that you learn from you know, having done things like these, for example, going from [inaudible] to Svelte? And then from pre Svelte 3 to Svelte 3? I thought that these are pretty major bumps. Right?
[00:06:09] RH: Yeah, I mean, I guess the main lesson that I've learned is probably that...