Svelte’s Creator Rich Harris on Rethinking Web Dev, Building Svelte & the Power of Tech Conferences

I was young and foolish. Too much JavaScript. It's a terrible design. Oh, I got to do everything in this now. I'm still making mistakes today. Was that a risky decision? I don't want to be a dictator in the project. Cannot treat an open source project as a democracy. It just doesn't work. Kind of psych. How many days in an advent calendar? I'm Scott Tolinsky with Syntax and today I'm at JS Nation talking with Rich Harris. How's it going, Rich? Good. How are you? Great to see you. This is uh an amazing conference so far at a

planetarium. What's it like being at a planetarium for a conference? As a speaker, it's great because like normally I worry that the the code is going to be too small. Yeah. On my slides. But here, like each character is the size of a person. So I didn't need to worry about that. And it was fun cuz I used to love coming to planetariums as a as a as a kid. And now I get to stand in one and and present. So yeah, great

venue for a conference. Yeah. Have you Have you ever seen anything like that before at a tech conference? I I can't say I have. The last conference that the venue was like I I could I could do this again. It was at a beach resort. Oh, nice. and kind of like had a slightly counterintuitive effect that people are are sat there watching the presentations but they're also just like looking looking past the slides at the at the beach. I could be on the beach right now. Whereas in a planetarium, we don't

have that problem. Kind of a captive audience, right? A little bit inspiring, right? Yeah. So, for the people who don't know who you are, what you do, do you want to give a a quick overview of what you do and who you are? Sure. Um, my name is Rich. I I am an open source developer. I I work full-time on a user interface framework called Spelt. It's my full-time gig now. My career history is is that my background is in journalism. Um, and I've been doing open source things for a long time. I made the the first version of the role at

module bundler. Yeah, that's me. That's amazing. Yeah. And how is I guess coming from journalism, how is that like shaped how you work today? Journalism has a lot less discipline than um traditional engineering. Um, you know, I used to work on these projects that had a very short turnaround like you're driven by the, you know, the deadlines of of the news cycle. And so, you know, people don't worry so much about technical debt and and things like that. And it's it's kind of eye opening to be working in an organization that takes engineering

discipline very seriously. Uh, it's kind of fun. It's a different culture. Nice. Yeah. I I worked at a magazine before and it was like a every month clean slate, right? And yeah, now with this, you certainly don't get get a clean slate. You have to keep iterating and building. Um, and you've been working on spelt now for a long time. What really inspired you to even start version one, pre- version, like what's

what inspired you to take that the first step into writing spelt? I guess you could say I was nerd sniped into writing it. Um, there was a lot of talk back then. And so we're talking about like 2016. It it's hard to imagine now, but back then um people were sort of talking about oh mobile is going to be the next big thing. Like a lot of web traffic was still on desktop and a lot of the tools that we' built to build websites were like based on the assumption that people going to be using them on on desktop. And that was becoming no longer true

around that time. And it was a problem that people were shipping large amounts of JavaScript to the browser. And I I remember Alex Russell in particular, the like the betair of the the JavaScript industrial complex. Um really kind of driving home that this is a problem that, you know, it's it's too much JavaScript.