Rich Harris talks SvelteKit and the future of web development

hello everyone welcome to another episode of spelt radio um I'm your host Kevin I run spelt school and today we have a very special episode we have uh the Creator ofelt on rich harus but before he gets to introduce himself we'll kick it off with our other hosts hey I'm Sean I work at AWS on random stuff including trying to get felt into AWS and that is an ongoing mission hi I'm Anthony and I'm the CTO of bianc I'm also a SP maintainer and

I'm a graphics editor at the New York Times currently working on spel kit oo cool the new shiny thing before we get started how's how's everything with the election and all of this stuff how's the workload for me thankfully it settling down last week was quite a busy week for everyone certainly in the graphics department at the times and probably in the organization as a whole it's very difficult to avoid getting sucked into the madness but you know what it's fun there's no better place to witness history than from a newsroom even if it

is a virtual Newsroom scattered around you know people's homes something I didn't didn't appreciate about your election coverage is that you're actually spinning up visualizations fairly quickly based on what counties or states are in focus at the time like there's some parts of this that you could not have prepared beforehand right yeah there's some slight of hand you know you prepare for iety of different outcomes but yeah like as soon

as the results start coming in the politics editors and the graphics editors who are covering this are bashing their heads together and and trying to figure out what is the story and then that kind of filters down to the people making the charts and maps and we all come together we analyze the data and we try and figure out what just happened there is some infrastructure that's already built out because you kind of know that people are going to want to know which parts of the country Swang in what direction but yes a lot of it is kind of rapid

response data visualization so you've got Lego blocks for building visualizations that will tell you population this area voted this way or whatever you've got that sort of stuff yeah like you know that you're going to need a lot of demographic information about counties like we know that the results are going to be coming in Per County or in New England it's per Township because they like to do things differently and you just have all of the data that you might possibly need in massive spreadsheet ahead of time and then you can all sort of plug it in to

make something relevant all right so we're not here for the election we're here for something that's more exciting I well you talk to that certainly is a matter of perspective for sure so uh we're going to talk about swel kit today so before we dive into the questions what is spel kit it says felka is one way it's a successor to sapper um you could even

think of it as sappa 1.0 if you like but in another larger sense it's our kind of vision for the way that you should build spell TAPS in future it's something that we've been kind of talking about in a peripheral sense for a long time we've been talking about how we can evolve sapper to take advantage of some of the recent Trends in front end development particularly the rise of serverless and

more recently the rise of unbundled workflows which we I'm sure we'll get into later but it all sort of came to a head recently you know the pace of development on sappa had hit a bit of a lull at least until Ben mccan um really picked at the bat and started churning through issues and people were getting a little bit frustrated I think with the progress I know Anthony is one of those people because he uses sappa very heavily in his job at a certain point we were like what if we just started from scratch like the big rewrite as opposed