Rich Harris, creator of the Svelte framework, stops by the podcast to talk about his work. Rich shares how Svelte originated from his work in newsrooms at The Guardian and The New York Times, where he developed tools for building interactive data visualizations under tight deadlines. We talk about how Svelte simplifies web development by bridging the gap between HTML/CSS knowledge and interactive applications, making it accessible to both experienced and novice developers. Our chat touches on the broader impact of Svelte, including its adoption in diverse applications like DataWrapper and smart TV interfaces. Rich reflects on the responsibility and challenges of leading an open-source project like Svelte and discusses the ongoing focus on SvelteKit, an application framework built on Svelte, and highlights accessible resources for beginners to get started.

Resources

Check out Rich’s website visit the Svelte development website

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Transcript

00:05.93
Jon
Hey Rich, good to meet you. Good, well morning, my time.

00:11.06
Rich Harris
Good morning. Thanks for having me on.

00:12.59
Jon
Yeah, ah very excited to chat with you. um Everyone I know who’s in the JavaScript D3 Svelte world is very excited about Svelte.

00:22.87
Jon
And so I was excited to be able to connect. I thought we’d start maybe with just intros and then talk a little bit about like the early development of Svelte and and what you’re doing now. Just start there, yeah.

00:33.73
Rich Harris
Sure. Yeah. Um, so my name is Rich. I’m, I’m a software engineer at a company called the cell. And I work full time on a user interface framework called Svelte. Um, and this is something that I’ve been working on now for eight years, over eight years. Um, in my previous life as as a journalist, I, um, worked in graphics departments at the guardian, um, the guardian us and the New York times. And Svelte is a project that.

01:04.73
Rich Harris
came out of the experiences that I had trying to build rich interactive data driven graphics in that environment. Because a lot of people who’ve who’ve dabbled with code, who’ve who tried to do this sort of thing will know it’s it’s really hard. And and Svelte was um my attempt to make that easier.

01:23.51
Rich Harris
Um, I left the New York times in 2021 and joined the cell to work on felt full time. And, uh, against all the odds, it’s become this, this sort of thing that is reasonably widely used in web development. Um, not just in database, but in web development more broadly to build various different applications. Um, and that’s me.

01:44.62
Jon
So Svelte is used primarily as a, well, let’s start with this for for folks who don’t know, can you, can you talk about what Svelte does that other similar libraries packages don’t do like D3, for example, is probably what most people who are listening to this podcast sort of think about immediately when it comes to JavaScript interactive data vids.

02:07.10
Rich Harris
Yeah, so the the first thing to know is that D3 and Svelte aren’t exactly competitors. um they They overlap a little bit.

02:14.41
Jon
Mm hmm.

02:14.49
Rich Harris
and they They solve some of the same problems, but they’re things that you can like very much use together, and a lot of people do.

02:22.31
Rich Harris
What Svelte is more akin to, um a lot of people might have heard of frameworks like React and Vue and Angular. And they all belong to this this category of projects that aim to make web development easier by making it essentially more declarative. um So in in development, we we often talk about this dichotomy between imperative programming, where you’re telling the computer exactly what to do at any given moment, and declarative programming, where you’re sort of defining what the world should look like and then letting the computer figure out the details for you.

02:57.26
Rich Harris
um And so the projects that I’ve described React is is the most prominent one. It’s the one that’s that’s most widely used. um they They give you essentially a framework for describing the application that you’re trying to build. D3 is a lot more on the imperative side. You’re you’re describing um what should happen at any given moment um with your data.

03:23.49
Rich Harris
It’s not quite as imperative as coding against the platform directly, like it gives you this this abstraction layer on top of it, um but less so than these more general purpose web development frameworks like Svelte and Light React.

03:28.52
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.

03:40.75
Rich Harris
It’s a little hard to describe in the context of a podcast, exactly what it is, because it it’s, it’s, it’s a, you know, podcasts are a great medium for having conversations about this stuff, but they’re a terrible medium for actually showing, showing people, like, and you really need to be able to kind of see it to to get a feel for what it is.

03:50.48
Jon
Yeah. They’re showing something. Yeah. Yeah. yeah

03:55.85
Rich Harris
But essentially when you’re building an application using Svelte, you’re writing a language that is based on top of HTML. And so a lot of people who, um, who dabble and and in this space,

04:08.51
Rich Harris
know a lot of HTML, know a lot of CSS. And the difference between having that knowledge and being able to write a rich int interactive application is. Well, those are static languages. They’re they’re good for describing sort of static chunks of a page. And then you’re sort of left you’re thrown into the deep end of of JavaScript in order to manipulate that in interesting ways and add data and add interactivity. And Svelte is a language that essentially adds interactivity to ah HTML.

04:39.87
Rich Harris
in a way, and it it does this in ah what we we aim to be a very concise and understandable way, so that if you have that background, you you know you know some HTML and you know some CSS, um you can you can start building interactive applications without having to go off the deep end and become a JavaScript expert.

04:59.63
Jon
Right. Right. I’m, I’m curious how your work at the Guardian and the times both inspired the development of Svelte and how it was sort of supported by colleagues or management or like, you know, we’re, we’re, was this like part of your core job of like, we need a better toolkit. We need a better solution. Or was this you like kind of dabbling off on the side and it kind of picked up steam over time?

05:31.50
Rich Harris
Very much the latter. the The nice thing about working in and newsrooms is that the The people who who run newsrooms have no idea about any of this stuff.

05:42.22
Rich Harris
like You’re very much left to your own devices. And so like if if you can kind of sit there and and and work on on a tool and people start to use it organically, then eventually they’ll turn around and say, oh yeah, it’s like you can you can do this.

05:57.80
Rich Harris
That’s fine.

05:57.93
Jon
Right.

05:58.72
Rich Harris
But there’s never a point at which it’s it becomes part of the job description.

06:02.78
Jon
Yeah, right.

06:03.03
Rich Harris
you know It’s very much an ask forgiveness rather than permission type situation, which is you know it’ completely at odds with how it works in a more traditional development environment.

06:07.25
Jon
Right.

06:11.59
Rich Harris
um And you know I think probably because of that, rather than in spite of that, newsrooms have historically been really good incubators of open source projects that are actually useful because they’re very much driven by day-to-day needs um as opposed to some

06:28.62
Jon
Yeah.

06:31.19
Rich Harris
like you know for for the sake of the project itself, they’re always a means to an end.

06:34.32
Jon
Right.

06:36.72
Rich Harris
And so, you know, the New York Times graphics department has as ah produced or um like very much aided the development of things like s spelt, but also D3, you know, Mike Bostock did a lot of the D3 development work while he was working in the New York Times graphics department.

06:49.62
Jon
Right. Yeah.

06:54.26
Rich Harris
um Other projects would include Backbone and Underscore from Jeremy Ashkenes, who a lot of that work also happened

06:58.50
Jon
Yep.

07:01.39
Rich Harris
at the New York Times graphics department. And there are plenty of examples from other newsrooms, like things like Django um have have all come out of this um the same sort of process. um And so, yeah, it’s it’s been like one of the, I always tell people, like if you’re a developer and you want to be able to do um really interesting work with interesting people, then like get a job in a newsroom.

07:27.21
Jon
Right, right. do you think it’s Was your work in the Newsome spurred by the storytelling part of journalism? Was it the technical challenges of sort of this I mean, eight years ago is not that far into like the modern date of his world, but like what was, from from your perspective, like what was the challenge you were trying to solve? Was it like, was it the storytelling piece or was it just a technical piece of there’s gotta be a better way or a more efficient way?

08:02.83
Rich Harris
it’s It’s both. um you know Newsrooms are a very deadline-driven culture for for obvious reasons. And so you need to build things quickly. um ah At the same time, like you’re you’re trying to do things that are engaging.

08:12.87
Jon
Yeah.

08:16.74
Rich Harris
like The whole point is to is to reach people and tell them a story in hopefully a way that they haven’t seen before um and be able to to to frame things in a way that is is novel and interesting.

08:30.78
Rich Harris
and You know, but when you’re trying to to to to solve both of those constraints, like you start hitting the limits of of what you can, what you’re physically able to do in a certain amount of time, given the tools that you have.

08:40.94
Jon
Yeah.

08:42.10
Rich Harris
And so we need tools that allow us to move very quickly, um you know, that allow us to build, you know, interactive visualizations and and so on that work on mobile devices and and don’t like slow to a crawl ah when when you open them.

08:59.82
Rich Harris
and

09:00.48
Jon
Yeah.

09:00.56
Rich Harris
and things like that. And, you know, candidly, when this project started, the tools that were available just just weren’t all that all that great for that. There’s lots of ways that you can do sort of off the shelf stuff, um you know, lots of kind of pre-baked charting solutions and things like that.

09:19.58
Jon
yeah

09:20.01
Rich Harris
But if if you want to do really novel stuff, then you have to be able to use code. And that’s where like all of your ambitions of getting stuff done by a particular deadline go go to die, because like as everyone who has wrestled with JavaScript knows, like it’s hard.

09:35.44
Rich Harris
It’s very hard to write bug-free software.

09:35.72
Jon
Right. Right. to to To that point about about um sort of, you know, graphic libraries, you mentioned Django and Backbone all coming out, D3 coming out of, or at least partly coming out of the New York Times. I mean, I think the other one that comes to mind is is Gregor Eich was there for a long time. And I don’t, you know, with with Data Wrapper, and i and I’m curious about your thoughts on Data Wrapper, which I understand is currently using Svelte and SvelteKit. I’m just curious about like,

10:05.64
Jon
I don’t know, your thoughts on that and other toolkits using Svelte in, I don’t know, even maybe ways that you hadn’t foreseen. I’d be curious about that as well. Like, are there are there use cases that you’ve seen that you’re like, oh, that’s taking in a new or different direction?

10:22.08
Rich Harris
the They definitely are. i so ah It’s intensely gratifying that Data Wrapper ah um have been such enthusiastic supporters of Svelte, and actually they’ve been very enthusiastic financial contributors to Svelte as well. like they you know they’ve They’ve directly helped finance the work.

10:39.20
Rich Harris
and I’m, I’m particularly proud of that because, you know, Gregor is someone that before I worked to the New York times, like kind of idolized, like part of the pantheon of like the, the great database practitioners.

10:48.88
Jon
Yeah.

10:50.81
Rich Harris
And, um, you know, now, uh, the company that that he runs is, uh, is like very closely and involved with spell. And, you know, he he’s obviously a ah personal friend, um, because we worked together at the, at the times.

11:04.91
Rich Harris
Um, and so like, I, I love to see that. And I.

11:08.16
Jon
Yeah.

11:09.88
Rich Harris
I’m biased, but I think they made a great technical choice as well. um And yeah, it really makes um makes a lot of sense in a context like that because um one of the things that component-based user interface frameworks like Svelte are really good at is um giving you a way to describe um things that are, like, so you have this spectrum, right, between the The things that are very much off the shelf and you have um very limited control over over how things work.

11:38.89
Jon
Yep.

11:42.52
Rich Harris
And then at at the the far extreme, you’ve got um all of the flexibility, but you have to do all of the heavy lifting yourself.

11:50.46
Jon
Yeah.

11:50.60
Rich Harris
And and that’s where like intricate D3 based visualizations often sit, like the really impressive set piece stuff, like the stuff that wins awards.

11:59.52
Jon
Yeah.

12:00.49
Rich Harris
And in between, there’s kind of this, this no man’s land, or at least historically there was this no man’s land. um And component-based frameworks kind of give you a structure for doing things that combine the like the reusable drop-in templating stuff with the more bespoke, okay, here are my little interactive ah flourishes and and my my annotations, which are really hard to do if you have a sort of configuration-based or template-driven

12:32.10
Rich Harris
um ah approach. And so if you’re building a platform like DataRapper, and there are others like evidence dot.dev is a different audience, but like similar kind of idea, um these things ah really lend themselves well to the component-based philosophy that has taken over web development over the last decade.

12:54.71
Jon
Yeah.

12:56.03
Rich Harris
um and And so yeah, it’s it and it makes a lot of sense. The more surprising uses I think are like Svelte has turned up on point of sale devices and in Latin America.

13:08.16
Jon
ah Wow.

13:09.23
Rich Harris
It’s turned up on you know smart TV interfaces um and things like that because it has this fairly small footprint and it can work on these lower powered devices um and you know gives people the ability to

13:12.10
Jon
Yeah.

13:19.73
Jon
Right.

13:24.08
Rich Harris
um to write interfaces that are are responsive without having to like drop down and and into the like the lowest levels of abstraction and and write this sort of very very painful and difficult to maintain code.

13:34.82
Jon
Yeah. Right, detailed code, yeah.

13:39.33
Rich Harris
um So yeah, it it turns up in in all sorts of weird places.

13:42.94
Jon
Yeah. How does that, just, I’m curious how, how that feels. So you you you you’re in ah newsrooms, you built this tool, presumably you sort of started, I would guess with like inspiration, like I could do my work better and then, you know, it sort of spreads in the newsroom. And now, you know, there are conferences, there are, you know, televisions using it. Like I’m just curious from your personal perspective, like how does that how does that success make you feel? Because it’s, I’m also curious because it’s not like,

14:17.86
Jon
ah It’s not like Rich Harris. It’s not like people use the Rich Harris framework, right? I mean, I’m sure many people know who are deep and involved. And I’m just, I’m curious from your just personal feeling about like, how does it, yeah, what how does it feel like to you, to have built something that so many people use every day?

14:37.63
Rich Harris
extremely weird. its it is It is a very strange feeling and it’s something that’s that’s happened very gradually. Like I mentioned that I’ve been working on this for eight years and in the beginning very much toiling in obscurity um and for a long time it was it was being a and a bunch of friends just like hanging out on the internet making this thing that we thought was cool and then gradually it sort of

14:59.93
Jon
Yeah.

15:03.23
Rich Harris
It achieved escape velocity. like it it It broke its containment and started becoming this this thing that um that people who who we had no connection with were using and were writing about.

15:15.34
Rich Harris
And then suddenly people are building educational material around this stuff. like There are spelt YouTubers and and things like that.

15:21.25
Jon
yeah

15:22.18
Rich Harris
um and you know we’ve we We tried to be active in the community and like understand like who the who the people are, who are using this stuff.

15:33.23
Rich Harris
But it’s at a point now where like we we can’t possibly have an actual relationship with all of the people using this software.

15:36.82
Jon
Right.

15:41.09
Rich Harris
um And every now and then, we’ll just sort of sit back and be like, oh, wow, this this is like this is a thing. like When did that happen? Yeah, it’s it’s strange.

15:52.33
Rich Harris
it’s it’s It is very flattering. um But it comes with a side of ah like i don’t want to say like existential dread because all of a sudden there there’s a responsibility.

16:05.11
Rich Harris
like People have, in many cases, invested um a lot in and using this framework and we need to make sure that

16:05.76
Jon
yeah

16:16.37
Rich Harris
that those people are supported, that they don’t feel like they’ve um they made it ah a terrible and and regrettable decision.

16:18.35
Jon
Mm hmm.

16:23.79
Rich Harris
And in some cases, like people are like it’s it’ss literally a significant part of people’s livelihoods. like They’re building companies on on top of this framework.

16:31.11
Jon
Right.

16:31.87
Rich Harris
Or they’re selling um training courses, and they’re doing workshops and stuff. And like it kind of weighs on us. Like you’ve got to be able to, um, to support that kind of thing. Um,

16:47.85
Jon
But it, but it also seems like because it’s open source, it doesn’t, I mean, it clearly doesn’t, it’s not like a Microsoft product, right? Where I go to your shop and I buy your, I mean, it’s open source. So like, do I, and I totally understand what you’re saying that there’s that level of responsibility of having created, having brought it into the world, but do you also feel like that responsibility is also shared now by people who, who are using it?

17:19.08
Rich Harris
yes Yes and no.

17:20.94
Jon
Mm hmm.

17:21.08
Rich Harris
um like Some people are are real hardliners ah ah about this. you you know um the The idea that the open source is a gift that I’m not beholden to my users if I make some some open source software.

17:30.36
Jon
Yeah.

17:40.91
Jon
Yeah.

17:42.36
Rich Harris
At the same time, i I don’t think that’s really a truthful reflection of how it actually works in in the real world.

17:52.34
Jon
Hmm.

17:53.19
Rich Harris
um you know Just by by virtue of the fact that you have put this thing out into the world and You know, I, I come on podcasts to talk about it and like, we’ve spent a lot of time building a website that articulates the reasons that you you would want to use this over some other thing.

18:10.19
Rich Harris
And when you do that, you’re, you’re kind of making a, a, an implied promise to your users that like, this is, this is a thing like we’re proposing that you use this thing because we think that it’s ah like a better choice than some of the alternatives.

18:18.67
Jon
Right.

18:28.49
Rich Harris
And to me, I don’t think you can honestly do that without acknowledging that by doing so you’ve put yourself in a position of of saying, um i I am committing to some degree to support you if you choose to use this.

18:45.48
Jon
Right.

18:48.58
Jon
Yeah.

18:48.66
Rich Harris
ah You’re not just throwing it over the wall and and letting people fend for themselves. And and if if you were, like no one would use it.

18:55.67
Jon
Yeah, right. So there’s that there’s that I guess level of leadership that’s sort of required as the original creator of something that people, I would guess to some extent people expect and people and people probably want to some like respect too.

19:12.54
Rich Harris
Yes, I mean, people often imagine that because something is open source, everyone can just just contribute. And like but the the maintainers are essentially fungible.

19:21.20
Jon
Yeah.

19:21.47
Rich Harris
um and that And that is just not how open source works at all in reality. For a project to have a continued successful life, it needs to it needs to operate according to some sort of coherent philosophical worldview, like it it needs to be moving in in a particular direction.

19:45.77
Rich Harris
um and And the direction is set by the people who are actively contributing um to the project.

19:45.85
Jon
Yeah.

19:52.83
Rich Harris
And it it can change over time, but if you just replace those people, like if you replace the people who have been working with the project for many years with people who you know, ah ah like maybe they’re very competent developers and maybe they’re very well-intentioned people, but, you know, they bring to it a new set of and ideas and a new set of requirements, then all of a sudden you’re not going in a consistent direction anymore.

20:16.77
Jon
Right.

20:20.36
Jon
Right.

20:20.56
Rich Harris
um and it And it becomes, you know, like people aren’t going to want to use a piece of software that doesn’t have a vision, that isn’t moving in in a particular direction.

20:31.27
Jon
Right. Yeah.

20:33.46
Rich Harris
um So yeah, I i understand the um the point of view of someone who says, I created this software and I decided to gift it to the world.

20:44.41
Rich Harris
And you know it is as is, here is the the MIT license.

20:45.76
Jon
I’m done.

20:50.04
Jon
Yeah.

20:50.42
Rich Harris
you know you can You can refer to that.

20:51.08
Jon
Yeah.

20:52.77
Rich Harris
But beyond that, I owe you nothing. like i just I just don’t subscribe to that view at all.

20:56.79
Jon
Yeah. So, so thinking, so, so then on direction, um, uh, maybe we can talk about Vercel a little bit, but, but just, uh, before we get to that, I’m i’m curious if you, uh,

21:11.28
Jon
could kind of jack into the to the matrix and could supercharge your to your work on Svelte right now. like Where where do you see where you would you like it to be or where were you where are you kind of directionalizing it over the next year, I mean, weeks, whatever whatever timeframe you you’re thinking about?

21:33.17
Rich Harris
Well, the thing that that keeps me motivated to work on this project is that web development is still way too hard. um i I believe that the web is a very important thing, and it’s kind of under threat. um It’s under threat from a lot of different forces, um not least the fact that you know people who use mobile devices actually don’t use the web a whole lot.

22:02.54
Rich Harris
um people have lost the habit of using the web. And that is like a a pretty perilous situation to be in when the alternative is proprietary app stores and you know closed ecosystems. And so you know I want it to be very easy for people to build stuff on the web. And Svelte is the best way that I can um i can work towards that goal.

22:32.70
Rich Harris
I also find that most software is is kind of broken on the web and off the web. like A lot of software is just not not particularly reliable.

22:40.94
Jon
Mm hmm.

22:41.06
Rich Harris
um If you actually pay attention to how many times a day a piece of software doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, it’s it’s pretty incredible.

22:49.46
Jon
Yeah.

22:49.92
Rich Harris
like we have you know This is the the the infrastructure of our lives, and it’s it’s crumbling more so than than our physical infrastructure. And I think that it should be easier, not just for people without deep technical backgrounds to be able to contribute to the web, but I think people who are building on the web should be able to build reliable bug-free software more easily than they are evidently doing today.

23:14.77
Jon
Mm hmm.

23:15.00
Rich Harris
And so if if I could like press the fast forward button, you know five years from now, Svelte would be more accessible to more people. it would be easier to build reliable and software, whether you’re building something like for yourself or you’re building something in the context of a news article at you know at ah um on a website, or you’re building a fully fledged application with a whole team of people building it, um that is the stuff that I think

23:55.57
Rich Harris
we really need to strike towards.

23:59.59
Jon
You know, it’s interesting ah listening to you talk about the direction because um I think at least my my outreach to you was really born out of the database world. And clearly it sounds like that’s where this whole project started out of the graphics desks. But when I hear you talk about it now, it it sounds and feels broader than just let’s make good, better data visualizations. let’s Let’s make the web better. Let’s make software better.

24:36.48
Jon
um And I’m curious, was there a point in the lifespan of the project where where you either decided or realized that this that the project is moving beyond making better charts, graphs, interactives, and into something broader or something different? Or is that right from the right from the get-go?

24:58.08
Rich Harris
um So Svelte was never conceived of as being solely for Dataviz. Dataviz just happens to be, in my view, one of the harder problems that you encounter as as a web developer, which is is’s sort of ironic.

25:09.64
Jon
Yeah.

25:12.60
Rich Harris
Like a a lot of the people who are working in Dataviz Um, are not programmers first and foremost, like a lot of people learn JavaScript as a means to an end.

25:22.40
Jon
yeah

25:22.70
Rich Harris
and And that’s, and that’s even true. You know, when you, um, when you go to places like the New York times, like the graphics department is is full of like, it’s the most absurdly talented group of people that you could meet.

25:34.33
Rich Harris
But like a lot of these people have come from reporting backgrounds or design backgrounds, not programming backgrounds.

25:40.50
Jon
Yeah.

25:40.77
Rich Harris
Um, and yet. when you’re building interactive data visualization, hard word, there’s like a ton of data that you’re dealing with and and you’re you’re trying to do like 60 frames per second animations and there’s interactivity coming from all different um places. Like there’s the’ things that you tap on and like you scroll and and things will adjust to, you know, show the next step of of the exploration and all of this stuff. Like this, I think is,

26:12.46
Rich Harris
a lot harder than building like your typical like dashboardy CRUD app, whatever.

26:19.23
Jon
Yeah.

26:19.49
Rich Harris
um and And so ah there’s like Svelte was designed to be the sort of general purpose um web framework

26:19.47
Jon
Yeah.

26:36.20
Rich Harris
But it was you know designed to be usable by people who are doing pretty hard things on a tight deadline.

26:45.40
Jon
Yeah.

26:45.54
Rich Harris
And that imposes, I think, certain technical and design constraints on on how you go about designing stuff. And you know it’s my view that if you can solve that, if you can solve the hard cases, then but you’ve also solved the easy cases without planning to.

27:00.81
Jon
Yeah.

27:01.30
Rich Harris
um And so over time, like I don’t know, I guess we just noticed that more and more people were using it as a general purpose web development tool.

27:09.21
Jon
Right. So I’m curious about, um, what you’re doing now. Um, we got this new gig, I think last four or five years, something like that.

27:19.35
Rich Harris
Yeah, just a little over three years, which is terrifying um to think about. Time really does fly.

27:25.74
Jon
time Time flies post pandemic.

27:28.54
Rich Harris
it It absolutely does. um So yes, but for the last three years, i’ve I’ve been working on this essentially full time. When I was at the New York Times, it was kind of ah a side project. I would get some work hours to work on it to the extent that it was beneficial to the like the the story that I was working on um at that time.

27:40.41
Jon
Yeah.

27:47.65
Rich Harris
um But now it is very much a full-time gig. And that’s enabled us to move a lot a lot faster.

27:54.27
Jon
Yeah.

27:54.39
Rich Harris
And the main focus right now is not Svelte itself, but the application framework that sits on top of Svelte called SvelteKit. So Svelte is the is the like the the small like the component um building block type framework.

28:11.68
Rich Harris
And then SvelteKit is OK, now what? Well, I need to um and need to set up my my build tooling and my dev server. And I need to deploy it somewhere.

28:22.10
Rich Harris
And I need to have like multiple different pages in my application. Svelte doesn’t solve those problems. So SvelteKit is is the layer on top of that.

28:27.96
Jon
Hmm.

28:29.54
Rich Harris
um And so right now, um after spending a lot of time on the new version of Svelte, which was released towards the end of last year, we’re now focusing a lot more on the application framework side of things.

28:40.75
Rich Harris
Um, cause that’s where, uh, I think a lot of the, a lot of the difficulty arises when building applications is like, how do you think about getting your data from the server into the browser and then back again? Um, and all those sorts of questions. So, um, yeah, that’s our current focus.

29:01.35
Jon
And when when you um release a ah a new version, like you said at the end of last year, do you I’m curious again, more not like not so much on the technical side, but on like the personal side. like Is that a moment of dread for you? Is that a moment like is that a moment of pride? like you You mentioned earlier, like there’s the hardliners. like I’m curious, like when you press that button and it goes out to the world, are you like holding your breath? like how What is that? and I assume it takes a long time to get to that point where you’re releasing an entirely new release. so like What is that moment like?

29:40.95
Rich Harris
There is a ah lot of breath holding.

29:45.48
Rich Harris
People don’t like change. um people People love progress, but they hate change.

29:48.82
Jon
Right.

29:51.31
Jon
yeah ah Yeah.

29:51.49
Rich Harris
yeah

29:52.39
Jon
Right. Yeah.

29:53.17
Rich Harris
um we’re We’re very lucky in the the the community of people who use FEL, a lot of them are really engaged in and what we’re doing. and so When we release a stable version, that is the combination of a process that’s been going on for you know but potentially a very long time. In the case of our recent Svelte 5 release, we’ve been working on it for about 18 months. And and people have been paying very close attention during that time. Some people had even been using the pre-release version.

30:23.40
Rich Harris
in their production applications. And so they had been giving us a lot of feedback that whole time, which like helped us refine the design in a lot of different ways.

30:26.11
Jon
Yeah.

30:34.26
Rich Harris
We changed a lot of decisions that we’ve made based on the feedback that we got from people. So by the time we released it, we had like a reasonably good idea of of whether we’d made the right calls on certain things.

30:46.88
Jon
yeah

30:47.60
Rich Harris
But there’s still like this this big unknown, like ah is like the the great mass of developers going to want to this? Or are they going to think that we’ve we’ve completely lost our minds?

30:56.58
Jon
Yeah.

30:57.07
Rich Harris
I’m happy to say that on the whole, the reaction has been very positive. But it’s it’s still always a very fraught time.

31:07.32
Rich Harris
And also, the minute that you release something stable,

31:07.74
Jon
Yeah.

31:11.63
Rich Harris
a lot more people start using it, which means a lot more people start filing bugs and feature requests and and all that sort of thing.

31:13.28
Jon
Right.

31:17.12
Rich Harris
So, you know, you kind of imagine in the weeks leading up to a big release, like I’m i’m working 14 hour days and and i’m I’m working myself to the bone, but it’s okay because we’re going to launch it and then we can we can take a week off.

31:24.19
Jon
Yeah.

31:29.98
Jon
Take a break.

31:30.31
Rich Harris
And that is exactly not what happens. Like you launch it and then suddenly your workload increases somehow.

31:35.62
Jon
Right.

31:37.01
Rich Harris
um And so it wasn’t really until Christmas that I think we were able to just truly breathe out and and take stock.

31:45.38
Jon
Yeah. Wow. Um, I want to, uh, just, just, uh, I just want to ah finish up with, um, one last question for folks who are listening to this who, um, I mean, maybe they’re programmers, maybe they’re not. What would your recommendation be to them if they wanted to at least sort of dabble or think about getting started using Svelte and in any of the things that we’ve been talking about, like where would you point someone first?

32:15.90
Rich Harris
So we’ve we’ve tried to make it as um as approachable as possible to the extent that we have this interactive tutorial that will teach you about Svelte the language and and how to use it without you needing to install anything to your computer. So you can just go to svelte dot.dev slash tutorial, and you’ll you’ll be walked through um all of the different concepts that you need to learn, like one at a time in these very sort of bite-sized manageable chunks.

32:43.97
Rich Harris
And then at the end of that, if you then want to build a Svelte application, then there is a command line tool um that you can use. At that point, you do need to have some familiarity with you know the terminal.

32:55.20
Rich Harris
And ideally, you need to be able to use Node.js because like that is what Svelte Kit runs on.

32:56.31
Jon
Yeah.

33:02.49
Rich Harris
um And so at that point, you start to have um slightly higher requirements. But in order to to use Svelte itself and the the playground on our website,

33:13.31
Rich Harris
You only really need to understand the basics of HTML and CSS. And like the the rest of it can sort of come come gradually.

33:17.80
Jon
Right.

33:20.90
Rich Harris
So that is where I appoint people first, spelt.dev slash tutorial um for the for the for the easy on-ramp.

33:28.60
Jon
Terrific. Uh, Rich, this has been a lot of fun. Uh, I appreciate you taking your time and chatting with me for a bit. And, um, I wish you the best of luck in the new year. I hope, uh, I hope things have started to calm down a little bit, although I know early January is kind of the opposite of that, but, uh, I appreciate so much and, uh, and, uh, for coming on the show.

33:39.22
Rich Harris
Me too. Yeah.

33:45.89
Rich Harris
Yeah, thanks for having me. um