Channel
Interviewed Person
Rich Harris
Codesmith Alumni Zachary Radford sat down with Rich Harris, an Emmy award-winning visual journalist and software developer on the New York Times graphics team. He is the creator of several widely-used open source projects including Rollup, the module bundler used by the JavaScript ecosystem's most popular libraries. In this conversation, Zachary and Rich discuss Svelte, a free and open-source front-end compiler most recently created by Rich Harris. 00:00 Introductions 00:55 How did you start out and manage your journey into coding while working in journalism? 2:31 What has the impact of journalists learning to code had on news in general? 5:25 Is there a moment you would point to as your inspiration for Svelte? 9:55 Can you speak to your first front-end framework, Ractive? 12:40 Can you tell us about what has changed from Practice to Svelte? What makes svelte special? 15:11Could you walk us through, at a very high level, your thought process and development process for creating a front-end framework? 17:32 Svelte is trending and the community loves it! What are the most in-demand things for us as contributors to help accelerate the evolution of the Svelte eco system? And what open source work is Svelte in need of most from the community? 22:22 Are there situations when Svelte is not the correct framework or compiler to be using? 25:47 You speak about SPAs, how they ruined the web, and your affinity toward what you call Transitional Applications. Do you think that by essentially rendering JavaScript unnecessary for Web Applications, will we see a large migration toward other languages and the internet being overhauled in the next decade? 29:41 If you had unlimited resources, what would you love to see in Svelte’s future? 35:52 Can you point to anything in particular that makes the Svelte community so strong? 40:27 There is a clear connection to straightforward communication within your code, is that tied to your experience as a journalist? 43:50 What makes you feel alive when it comes to code? 47:03 Is there anything big on the horizon that you are working on? 50:12 Do you have any advice you would give your younger self?
[Music] it is so i'm going to introduce our very special guest here many people know him from his emmy award-winning work uh the guardian on the graphics team or his work on reactive or his work on roll up or from his front end of masters course any point in his illustrious career uh but if you're here you probably know him
as the creator of svelte so i'd like to introduce rich harris please everybody give him a round of applause hi nice to be here thank you thank you so much for joining us uh so generous of you to come i know you're extremely busy uh it's wonderful to have you here um before we get directly into svelt um i want to hear a little bit about you know how you started out i mean i know i just watched that um the offer zen documentary that came out which is really great um and you talked about um
beginning to to code for the graphics team and things like that can you tell us a little bit about the journey you're just starting out you're getting into coding um while you're working in journalism yeah so the the short version is that um i started out in journalism and and quickly realized that it's a terrible industry where people just lose their jobs at a moment's notice um and i've been laid off as a journalist i think most people i know who've worked in journalism have been laid off at some point and it was like a fairly cynical calculation
that i needed to make myself more employable but also like learning to code is is this thing that gives you i mean i don't wanna i don't wanna over romanticize it but like if you can if you can write code then you have a kind of a superpower you can do things within your existing job that are very hard unless you have the power of automation and in the case of journalism that meant being able to produce interactive pieces data visualizations all those sorts of things and i was working at a financial publication where
like we dealt with data all the time and it was very natural to want to be able to do you know quantitative journalism and and visual journalism that use data in some way and we just weren't doing it because like we didn't know how and so uh you know slowly at first and then all at once i i started tinkering with javascript um in order to do that that kind of work
kind of speculate a bit or tell us a bit about what you think the the impact of journalists learning to code has had on news in general uh i i mean i i don't think we i think we should be careful not to overstate it um it's like there's this meme in the news industry that everyone should learn to code and uh it's a little demeaning honestly um as if uh as if journalists who can code are more valuable than journalists who can't when in reality like journalism is this
very broad ten and it covers like so many different um but related jobs and so many different skills and writing code is just one very small piece of that puzzle um but i do think that you know culturally journalism has always kind of turned its nose up a little bit uh things like numeracy um you know journalists are always very self-effacing about how they're not numbers people
um and that's that's like a really shameful thing to admit when your job is to uh is to understand and and report the world and do so in a way that improves the the understanding of your readers then you know being able to be hoodwinked by misleading statistics or being unable to explain uh what numbers mean is like a a really terrible