Rich Harris - Svelte, Rollup

A newsroom is a fairly esoteric environment and a lot of ways, but I've found that if you can solve the development requirements of a newsroom, then you've actually solved a lot of development problems that are pretty much universal. Hello, welcome to the DevTools.fm podcast. This is a podcast about developer tools and the people who make them. I'm Andrew and this is my cohost Justin. Hi everyone, our guest today is Rich Harris. Rich is, and correct me if I'm wrong, Rich and interactive journalists at

the New York times who also somehow finds time to create high quality, tooling and frameworks like Svelte, Rollup, degit in your free time. And what free time you have a rich, is there anything else you'd like to tell our audience about yourself? No. I prefer to cultivate an air of mystery... although I, I will correct your pronunciation. It's supposed to be Degit everyone gets that wrong. It's like you're removing the git parts from the git repo.

Cool. Rich, it's honestly such a pleasure. Always really enjoy talking with you. So just to start right off it's not an exaggeration to say that the projects that you've worked on have had a profound impact on the entire, front-end JavaScript ecosystem. How do you find time to invest in this deep work? When you're you have a job that I'm assuming is quite timely and takes some intense concentration, then I know that you build tools that you use for that job.

So how do you find that? Do you all this other stuff? Firstly, you're very kind to say those nice things. The reality is I don't find nearly as much time as I would like, or as the projects need as anyone who pays close attention to the development on svelte and svelte kit can probably attest my track record of estimating when things are going to be done is less than stellar. But you're right that the job. Pretty deadline driven. It can be pretty intense at times.

And I guess I try to strike a balance by carving out opportunities to work on these projects during work hours, to the extent that they're useful to the projects that I'm working on. And beyond that, it's the usual sort of evenings and weekends sacrifice that I just try to balance with having a normal life But it's tough there, there aren't in a thousand a day. Yeah, I feel, yeah. Maybe for people who don't know about what you do.

Could you explain more like what your role is at. I can. So I'm on the graphics department at the times, which is a team of, I think, about 50 or so people who are all, some combination of journalists and designer and developer. In that mix, you also have people who specialize in things like cartography and the department. It does many things. It responds to breaking news events that will quickly provide locator maps that tell you where a particular disaster is happening, or it will put together visual explainers of what we know about a current news event. But it will also do these deep dives into stories that are best told visually.

Good example would be some of the work that my coworkers did around the Olympics. Doing these really detailed breakdowns with motion capture of how different athletes in different disciplines perfected their craft. And it really spans the gamut from quick, like two hour turnaround projects to these months, long, deep dives. For the last two years, I've mostly been working on our coronavirus

tracker, which is a set of pages that show you where a coronavirus cases are in the U S and around the world. More recently I did some some Olympics coverage of my own and in the background I spent a lot of time thinking about our production workflows and how we can be more efficient in the creation of interactive graphics. So going off of that is that where all of your various frameworks spun out of? I don't think most people would hear your job title and what you do and go, "Oh yeah, he's going to create the competitor to Webpack." How did that come about? It kind of did come out of the requirements of working in a newsroom.