A Dialogue with Svelte Creator: Rich Harris

[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