Rich Harris – North Star, JSNation US 2024

[Applause] [Music] as a child I was obsessed with space I

loved coming to places like this on cloudless nights I would go into our back garden with my father himself a bit of a space cadet and he would teach me how to read the sky he taught me the names of the stars and the constellations he taught me that the things that seem most fixed are not fixed but that through careful observation you can begin to predict their movements and he taught me how to find the North Star on a clear night if you can find the Big Dipper then you can extend this

line a little further to find Polaris so named because a line drawn from the South Pole to the North Pole and extended into space would just about meet it it is the fixed point about which the heavens turn and it always points due north ancient Mariners used Polaris to cross the oceans in the early United States escaped slaves followed it to Freedom today we don't tend to rely on Celestial navigation we have Google Maps but I've been thinking a lot lately about this concept of being able able to

orient ourselves in an otherwise uncertain environment and how it applies to other areas of Our Lives what does it mean to be pointing the right way my name is Rich Harris you can find me at richh harris. deev on Blue Sky and this is a talk about finding direction and purpose in open source like many of you I write software for a living more specifically I work on a user interface called spelt I started working on spelt eight years and three days ago it started out

as an innocent fun side project that I had no idea would take over my life the big idea was this what if a framework rather than being code that ran in the browser was a compiler that transformed your component into self-contained JavaScript we called it the magical disappearing framework and compared to things like react It produced astonishingly efficient bundles because it moved work out of the browser and into your build process we could make your apps really small and really fast

spel 3 came out in 2019 and asked a different question can we use the compiler to make web development itself faster if we're not constrained by the rules of JavaScript can we make components easier to write with less boiler plate that was the point at which people really started paying attention to spel it turns out that while most developers care very deeply about performance and bundle size in theory in practice we pick the tools that we enjoy using

some thought leaders will try to shame you for this but I think it's pretty reasonable that if you're going to spend 40 hours a week working on something it may as well be fun and with compilers better developer experience needn't come at the expense of user experience and spelt has a really good developer experience at least according to surveys like the state of JavaScript I don't know how long we can keep this streak up but I'm excited to find out spelt by itself only solves narrow

slice of the problem of building a web application namely keeping the Dom in sync with your application State and leaves everything else to you like setting up your build tooling organizing your code defining your roots generating optimal bundles and deploying to different environments and many many other problems in 2020 we started working on a companion project called spelt kit which was the first major framework to be built on top of vit it's designed to solve those problems for you all of which is to say that the project has had many ident is over the