A Dialogue with Svelte Creator: Rich Harris

Codesmith Alumni Zachary Radford sat down with Rich Harris, an Emmy award-winning visual journalist and software developer on the New York Times graphics team. He is the creator of several widely-used open source projects including Rollup, the module bundler used by the JavaScript ecosystem's most popular libraries.

In this conversation, Zachary and Rich discuss Svelte, a free and open-source front-end compiler most recently created by Rich Harris.

00:00 Introductions
00:55 How did you start out and manage your journey into coding while working in journalism?
2:31 What has the impact of journalists learning to code had on news in general?
5:25 Is there a moment you would point to as your inspiration for Svelte?
9:55 Can you speak to your first front-end framework, Ractive?
12:40 Can you tell us about what has changed from Practice to Svelte? What makes svelte special?
15:11Could you walk us through, at a very high level, your thought process and development process for creating a front-end framework?
17:32 Svelte is trending and the community loves it! What are the most in-demand things for us as contributors to help accelerate the evolution of the Svelte eco system? And what open source work is Svelte in need of most from the community?
22:22 Are there situations when Svelte is not the correct framework or compiler to be using?
25:47 You speak about SPAs, how they ruined the web, and your affinity toward what you call Transitional Applications. Do you think that by essentially rendering JavaScript unnecessary for Web Applications, will we see a large migration toward other languages and the internet being overhauled in the next decade?
29:41 If you had unlimited resources, what would you love to see in Svelte’s future?
35:52 Can you point to anything in particular that makes the Svelte community so strong?
40:27 There is a clear connection to straightforward communication within your code, is that tied to your experience as a journalist?
43:50 What makes you feel alive when it comes to code?
47:03 Is there anything big on the horizon that you are working on?
50:12 Do you have any advice you would give your younger self?