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 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 and so as someone who had previously