Svelte Summit is over, what a bummer!

This week we talk about all the awesome talks that we saw at Svelte Summit. It was a bit long, but wow, was it good! Great Event. And we hope you all come to the next one in the first half of 2021!

If you missed it, you can tune-in on the Svelte Society YouTube channel. To get news about the next event, sign up to the newsletter.

Show Notes: SVELTE SUMMIT - Check out the talks and the website!

Transcription:
[00:00:00] KA: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Svelte Radio. I’m your host, Kevin. And I ran a site called Svelte School and I’m joined by my two co-host, Antony and Shawn.
[00:00:11] AJ: I’m Antony, the CTO of Beyonk. I’m a Svelte maintainer. And actually, I can say this now, I’m currently working on Sveltekit, which is quite fun,
[00:00:18] SW: Oh, that’s hot. We should talk about that. I’m Shawn. I work at AWS and temporal. I don’t really kind of work on anything, but I do use other GS a lot, so that’s fun.
[00:00:30] KA: All right. Last weekend -- it was last weekend, right?
[00:00:35] SW: October 18th, I had the date memorized because I was so promoting it so much.
[00:00:41] KA: I have no idea. Time is not my --
[00:00:45] SW: Ground circle.
[00:00:46] AJ: Yeah, I know. Not mine.
[00:00:47] KA: All right. What did you guys think? Was it good.?
[00:00:50] SW: Yeah. I think we went very well. I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick through the whole event, but it was going to be a long one and it was very late at night and on a weekend. But then, I just found the conversation really entertaining, the talks are cool and I stuck around for the entire thing.
[00:01:06] KA: Well, that’s awesome, seven hours.
[00:01:08] AJ: Yeah. I mean, I also did stick around for the whole thing.
[00:01:12] SW: You cycled like a billion miles.
[00:01:15] AJ: Actually, it’s quite a short cycle, because I was trying to moderate the chat from my phone while sitting on the bike, watching the conference. But also, I had like the cycle trainer up and everything else. Yeah, it was interesting, trying to do too many things at one space. I think I did like 20, 25k or something, which is not impressive but it’s worth doing. It was a good feeling as well. What I found was it’s surprisingly easy to concentrate when you’re a cycle trainer watching a conference. I think that I’d like to just go to more events like that, but while cycling because it works really well.
[00:01:54] KA: I like working out as well while like watching stuff because it’s nice
[00:01:58] AJ: But it’s quite hard, right? I’ve tried running and watching The Simpsons and I can’t do that. It’s just impossible, but this was much easier for some reason.
[00:02:06] KA: Cycling is probably a bit easier, kind of in my mind at least feels like it would be easier.
[00:02:12] AJ: Yeah. Well, you’re sitting down for one thing, but also, I guess you can vary the cadence quite easily. Like you can just change gear and make it easier or harder if you want to focus on a specific bed. It’s not like you’re having to maintain it constant all the time. Yeah, it works really well, works really well, so I’ll try to do that in the future actually. Then yeah, watching the rest on the TV downstairs, and it was me watching it and enjoying it, and my wife having enforced upon her. That’s, you know, hey.
[00:02:41] KA: Which talks did you guys like the most? I think my favorite was like The Web à la Mode one, for sure.
[00:02:47] AJ: Oh, yeah.
[00:02:47] KA: Like in a creative way, I really like that one. The flying head and --
[00:02:52] AJ: Yeah. I think that’s an easy one.
[00:02:55] SW: I mean, he actually I think expanded. I personally do a lot of pre-recorded classroom speaking. He’s a first-time speaker and he expanded my idea of what a pre-recorded talking do. It’s like he built that thing, and then played music. Then the rest of the talk was, had that back in music. Now, it’s just genius.
[00:03:17] AJ: Yeah. It’s nice to have a pay setter like music wise. I don’t know if you have heard of the comedian, Mitch Hedberg. He’s death now, but he always had this like weird beat going onto like his entire set. It elevates it. It adds like a massive dimension to it, and I’m not really sure why. I can’t remember what the beat is. It’s like — I think it’s somebody playing an instrument called Chuck. When his jokes changed and when his jokes starts to fail, or whatever, which he do a lot because he’s kind of an abstract comedian. He will just say, “Can you just sort of ramp it up a bit, Chuck” and Chuck sort of increase this tempo a bit and change up the way it sounds.” 
[00:03:56] KA: That’s such a good idea.
[00:03:57] AJ: It’s really good. It’s really good that way to do it, actually. So if you’ve got sort of — [inaudible 00:04:00] it’s ridiculous. But if you got somebody who can play an instrument, get him along to your talk, and they can play in the background.
[00:04:09] KA: Pro tip.
[00:04:09] AJ: Yeah.
[00:04:10] SW: Just to mention some of the others. I realized that there’s a lot of curiosity around talks, transitions and animations. I think we have three talks. One, Nicolo Davis on crossfade, and then we had Mark Volkmann on animations and then we had Li Hau on transitions. I thought that was — I always wondered that and it’s kind of wishful for me to actually have talks like things that really explored how they work and what we can do with them.
[00:04:40] AJ: Yeah. so another reason that I mentioned his talk is because, it’s really, really difficult to talk on something that’s kind of intricate and complex. It’s very to do talks — not very easy, but it’s easy to do talks on sort of more high-level subject. Building that, building this, building that. But when you try to go into complex detail about an internal of something and do a talk on it, and present, and maybe even life circumstances, which is just next level. But it’s really, really difficult and I think prepping talks, I found that I tend to shy away a bit for more complex subject, because I don’t feel like we’re understanding as good as it should be to get a talk, right? So yeah, I think extra props as people did that kind of talk as well.
I think it’s also worth mentioning, Luke’s talk for me, because I think — especially since I kind of had prior knowledge of what Sveltekit was doing. It was really interesting to see how you could deploy an application to Cloudflare Work because that’s — it’s something that’s really pushing the boundaries of serverless and what we’re going kind of thing.
[00:05:43] KA: I’ll be that guy. I confess that — I think that talk was above my pay grade. I didn’t really — I have some familiarity with serverkess functions, but I didn’t feel like I got the pitch. So I need to watch it again, because I didn’t really get like what the benefits were. Like is it faster?
[00:06:03] AJ: If you’re building an application and you’re responsible for deploying the application. Your kind of primary goal is to get the hosting really scalable, get it resilient, keep the cost down and make it as fast as possible. I think that Cloudflare Work is — and kind of C game work like that will fulfil all of those criteria, because you’re running your application at the edge, like you’re literally as close to the user as possible, really, other than having a machine in that living room that’s serving them. But also, you’ve got that resilience because there’s so many Cloudflare nodes. It’s full serverless because they are basically tied in serverless work. 
It’s really of interest to people, I guess who are thinking about deploying an application and sort of determining and deciding on what infrastructure they’re going to use. I think it’s I think it’ll go over the head for a lot of people because they might not be in that kind of space where they have to do that. But I think once you start looking at the array of service offering that are on there right now, there’s so many. It’s really hard to pick and choose between them. It goes all the way from kind of sort of the prior art of Heroku where you’re getting a little dedicated virtual machine to serve your application up all the way to Cloudflare Work, which is a very different concept doing a fundamentally the same thing. Yeah, I think that’s the case for a lot of people but I think at some point, you may be, “Uh-huh. I’m going to go and watch that talk now because I need to do this thing.” 
[00:07:31] KA: I’m a big fan.
[00:07:32] SH: Yeah, I know you are. To get it straight, Svelte kit is kind of built with this motto in mind that we want to be able to render from within a worker. It seems like that’s the case, because I also see this happening in VX Land, the new meta-frame that’s coming out this week REMIX from Michael Jackson [inaudible 00:07:49]. They’re also adopting this model, and it seems like the new trend is coming out. It also links in my head to Glen Maddern, he’s the guy who came up with CSS Modules. He’s been promoting this idea for a while, of fabs, frontend application bundles, kind of containers for your frontend that you can ship to [inaudible 00:08:06] workers. He was on this idea like two years ago, everyone just ignored him because it’s just so weird.
[00:08:13] AJ: That’s the downside to being the first dork kind of thing. Yeah, just on this point, yeah, Sveltekit is designed to be kind of serverless first because it does seem like the most logical way to deploy an application, and it can be done pretty smoothly while giving you a good death experience locally if done with that in mind. A lot of serverless right now doesn’t really factor that in and it’s quite hard to develop locally, because you try to run this impossible architecture in your local machine.
The Fab thing was mentioned to me recently, and I sort of got excited about until Rich’s stuff. Rich had already been contacted by them a few months prior. And yeah, the concept of adapters and Fab house a lot have overlapped. But what was sort thinking is we might build a Fab adapter so that you’ve got these first-class citizen deployment mechanisms for sort of the biggest and for me the easiest deployment platforms. Then for everything else, you’ve kind of got Fab because by writing one single adapter for Fab, you’re opening a lot of doors. I think Fab is an excellent idea. It’s absolutely brilliant and I wished I’ve found it myself a lot earlier in fact, because I think it’s just going to save, especially when you haven’t got the resource to build something in the platform agnostic way, you’ve got this adapter that will allow you to basically build for anything at all, which is great. So yeah, so Fab is pretty exciting actually.
[00:09:32] SW: My take on it is that we have too many config clouds in the world, and if we just all agreed on one config cloud, then the world would be a better place. The 15th config file, when they’re already 14 around, because I was trying to do that. But I think because every serverless provider I guess has their own config file, so this would be sort of platform agnostic one.
[00:09:55] AJ: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s worth mentioning at this point. I’ve looked at all these providers obviously, part of building the kit and stuff. But also, I’ve look at these providers for a while to determine where I’m going to deploy my stuff to. I think that my favorite so far has been the open GS architect that begin.com uses. It’s just really clean. It makes a lot of sense. It’s not any known format in terms of like, it’s not like million passes. But they do have a library, you can pass it with code architect, I think.
I just found the format really clean and logical, and if there’s any one standard for config files, which I really don’t think will happen. I would love it to be architect because it’s just great.
[00:10:34] SW: I’ll provide the counter argument, which is that if you’re truly platform agnostic, that’s great. You could take a code anywhere, but then you’re also not taking advantage of the platform by definition, right? Anything in that platform can build. You can’t take advantage of it, because it’s going to be unique for that particular platform. For example, offers begin data and you can’t use that anywhere else, so goodluck.
[00:10:57] AJ: It’s very true. Howeve, what I would say, it’s almost a store argument actually, because the Begin data interface is extremely simple, right? It gets us that and that does it. I think that — let’s not kid ourselves, Begin data is just them. What’s that Amazon database called, the key value one? Dynamite DB. It’s just Dynamite DB. I think anybody who was this sort of this IT architect format, they could either not have a data element to it and just say, “We don’t have a data element.” Or they can implement a key value against that over anything at all. I think it’s quite abstract enough that you could implement to yourself on anything you wanted to, if I could say. So yeah, I mean, I totally get your argument, Shawn, but I think that obstruction makes things a little bit harder for the implement, but I think it’s definitely possible.
[00:11:44] SW: Shall we go back to a frontend?
[00:11:47] KA: Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, we will. Let’s talk about Plenti. Did you guys tried this before the talk?
[00:11:56] SW: I have not. I checked out the site and — I mean, it’s a cool site but I haven’t tried it yet.
[00:12:02] AJ: Yeah, it’s on my to-do list, but then so I have many, many things. It sounds like a great idea. It’s sort of less developer-centric, which is really nice. It’s something I hope to do soon, but I haven’t had any chance to look at it at any depth yet.
[00:12:17] SW: I feel bad. I’m going to go try it out because it’s a site builder. They’re betting their business on Svelte, just like [inaudible 00:12:24] bases and we got to try all these things. Otherwise, how are they going to succeed and how Svelte is going to grow with nothing.
[00:12:32] KA: I did actually try it like I think maybe a month or two ago. Just download the like starter, their example. It seemed like a nice thing, but I didn’t try anything like more complex on that. But from the presentation, it looked like really nice, very simple, very easy to get going. There are a lot of static site generator in this conference. Well, two.
[00:13:03] SW: I mean, then there’s Elder.js, I think — yeah.
[00:13:05] AJ: But yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying. It’s not developer-centric because it feels like Plenti is designed a bit more for maybe a business-minded person who doesn’t have the technical skills to really — because it’s pretty complicated for non-developers. The thing that’s really needed is — either, if they’ve done it a million times over the years, somewhere somewhat we got it right. Building websites, its not going to ever producer the kind of website that you might get build by a dev team, but it’s certainly can build something that’s fast, and light, and appealing and responsive, and flexible enough that you can build at least an MVP or yeah, maybe even run your entire business on it, depending how small you are. So yeah, it’d be good to see something in that space, so hopefully Plenti is that.
[00:13:50] KA: I think Plenti is like — so Elder.js is a bit daunting to get started with compared to that, Plenti seems extremely easy comparatively, right?
[00:14:06] SW: Yeah, of course I met Elder. Like if I didn’t have Nick Reese on top for support, then I would not have gotten anywhere from --
[00:14:16] KA: Yeah. But I think — speaking of Nick, his talk was really nice. I think it showcased like the strength of Elder.js pretty well.
[00:14:26] AJ: It did and it showed me kind of — because I knew of it and I knew roughly about it, so I didn’t know much about it in depth, then I was looking forward to the talk because I wanted to actually see it, building sort of simple app in it. It is exactly what I thought it would be, which is, it is specifically designed for SEO. It’s not something you use to build your application website, your underline shop or something. Really, it’s something you build to build an online estate of highly indexable content for marketing, which is — it fits perfectly, but a very different offering to say, Plenti anyways. 
[00:15:02] SW: I haven’t told Nick this. I’ll just think out loud because that’s my [inaudible 00:15:09] here. Building a statis site generator for SEO, that’s a weird bending thing to me, because SEO to me sounds like, make it fast, make it statically rendered, put all the right metatags and then write great content. That has nothing inherently to do with the static site generator. That’s where I really struggle with this idea. For him also, he really cares about massive scale, so even his demos are — which is always a lot of pages and you can really see that it’s build for size. 
To me, the build for size and the island’s architecture like the whole Zero.js by default thing, that appeals more to me than built for SEO. Because SEO to me sounds like just set some of the tags.
[00:15:53] AJ: Yeah.
[00:15:55] KA: Yeah, I think I agree there. I guess for my take away was that, what he’s doing is actually generating a lot of content this indexable without having to write all that content manually. So taking a set of data and giving different views of that data, and then positioning those views at that data, and that search engine can quite easily interpret and use, and Google is going to sort of pull out the questions. Some ways, it has more easy from that content, and it’s going to have more relevance because you’re taking — it’s like when you — that when you’re applying for jobs and you have a bunch of CVs, resumes and you tailor those resumes for each job. So in this resume, I’m a strong JavaScript developer. In this resume, I’m a strong node developer kind of thing.
I think that for me where I see Elder.js fitting.
[00:16:43] SW: I also want to shoutout one thing on which I changed my mind, which I think that’s a very useful thing for other people to think about. I used to be very excited about this idea of MDX, like you write Markdown and then you write some Svelte inside of it or you write some React inside of it, and it becomes a React or a Svelte component. I think I’ve changed my mind on that. Now, I don’t use MDX anymore. And Elder.js has this idea of short codes, and I think that’s actually more future proof and I think that’s what Nick Reese is also causing. I really believe in that now I think, because it separates the idea of like, “I can have that content with the short code, but I can choose to reimplement the short code in whatever other future framework that I wish to have.” The only thing that I have a dependency on is the format of like, what’s the opening and closing time of the short code and all the meta-data that it provides there. I don’t need all the other stuff, because I’m going to probably going to take it out anyway into some kind of layout component, or some kind of reusable replacement for like H1 A tag, but whatever.
I think I changed my mind on that specific thing, so I just figured I shared it. I don’t know. Obviously Penguin will not be too happy to hear that, because I was a big supporter. I was like, “Oh yeah, MDX is like the future.” Then I was like, “Hmm, maybe not.” 
[00:18:02] KA: Short code is a thing from like the WordPress era, right? Probably earlier than that even, but it’s one of those like I completely forgotten about short codes after I started using Svelte. But then, once you’ve realized how powerful they actually are for static content like this or like generating content from other content and putting it into a short code like counting stuff and all sorts of things. It kind of becomes a must have I think when you start using them. 
[00:18:41] SW: I think one thing that I wish people were more thoughtful about is how graceful degradation looks like. For example, if I was blogging in MD Specs, right? Then I’ll have a whole bunch of like different Svelte component in my Markdown. But if I was going to render that to RSS, what does that mean? I don’t know. It doesn’t — it’s going to come up like a jumble of stuff. But then when people implement short codes, they’ll do things like, “Okay, I want to embed a YouTube video inside my content, right?” So I’ll say, short code, open tag, YouTube and then the ID, but that also doesn’t degrade very gracefully.
What I actually want to do is paste the YouTube URL, so if someone comes to mine without that MDX — the short code passing, we can still just click the URL.
[00:19:27] KA: Yeah. That makes sense. It could probably write an Elder.js plug in for that.
[00:19:31] SW: My problem with this is not Elder.js. It’s actual Dev2. I used that too as my CMS and then I syndicate it to Elder.js.
[00:19:39] KA: Oh, okay.
[00:19:38] SW: By the way, that’s an SEO hack because Dev2 forwards all the conical traffic to your domain. So it’s — I don’t know how long it’s going to last. It’s a very, very quickly to rank very highly on Google.
[00:19:52] KA: I’m going to edit this out, keep it for myself.
[00:19:56] AJ: Yeah.
[00:19:58] KA: No, I’m just joking. Should we move on to some of the other talks that we saw? We talked shortly about MD Specs just now or Shawn did mention it. We might as well talk about Peter’s talk, the REPLicant. That was mind-blowing to me. I had no idea how REPL work behind the scenes and how you bundle stuff in the browser. That’s crazy.
[00:20:22] SW: The fact that people like this just casually do things like this for talks is mind-blowing.
[00:20:27] AJ: Yeah.
[00:20:28] KA: Way above my pay grade for sure.
[00:20:31] AJ: I think mine too.
[00:20:33] KA: It was great, though. It was nice in a way because it introduced like so many topics in a kind beginner friendly way in a sense, like you use TypeScript in Svelte for example. That’s not something you often see. You wrote a rollup plug-in, like all these things to me are not something I know a lot about, like writing rollup plug-ins or bundling or all of that.
[00:20:55] AJ: Yeah. I mean, it was well-explained. It was obviously a whole thing, this life code effectively. It’s quite a fit. It’s one of those things again that goes back to, you can do a sort of high-level talk or you can go in depth from something and that’s just massively, massively more challenging I think. Especially then to life coding as well, so yeah.
[00:21:17] SW: I think for listeners, I’ll kind of stress the business value of doing something like this. The whole point is to decrease the barrier to trying something out. If I had to download anything, you’ve probably lost like 90% of the people who visit your site, who care about you. If I can hit your site and then see something live immediately and just play with it, then you’ll have a higher chance of people getting it, and then actually trying you up on their local machine.
One example that recently happened was Tailwind. They’ve always had some sort of — on their landing page, some animation of what the concept, but they also recently released a Tailwind playground. That’s also another process of like — we have to have some kind of compiling browser type of situation. But it lets you try it out and it also lets you share it. As much as the Svelte REPL is so useful within this small community, I generally feel like Svelte would not be as big today if Svelte REPL did not exist.
It’s a similar thing to basically everything in developer tool gate. Like if you are trying to come up with a new format, like a Fab or like show me how to validate and verify my config file. Or like, I’m doing consulting for Temporal.io that I owe and we want to show like a different program and model. Right now, people have to pull a docker container and run it just to see what it’s like — what if they could just run it in the browser. I think this technology is like a really good foundation for demonstrating anything.
I’m on Penguin’s read me, which like — he actually cares about docs, which is amazing and he’s got like the ruby playground, the go playground, the Go playground, Rust playgroud. Like everyone prioritizes this for a good reason.
[00:22:56] KA: Yeah, I think, speaking of like the Svelte REPL, we should probably try to make that indexable somehow.
[00:23:03] SW: One thing I want to do is like Svelte Society or something like that, with like a good name and description, and then people could heart it. Then we could start by like most favorited REPL or just like, you want an example of the model, here’s like 10 different models on REPL. I would love to do that.
[00:23:20] KA: Somehow.
[00:23:21] AJ: Yeah. I mean, so Svelte REPL, you can save and you can save endlessly and paginate the results, but that’s about it. It really lacks functionality to delete, to rename, to reindex, to share. On sharing links, it’s not as very as straight forward as it could be. It’d be really cool to build the kind of top list of those really good features. So if anyone is out there listening and find this as task or project, there you go.
[00:23:46] SW: I’m keen on that, like I want to pick it up as part of my AWS portfolio as well.
[00:23:51] AJ: It’s a race, Shawn. It’s a race. You’re going to race with Svelte community.
[00:23:57] KA: Some other talks, we had a talk on data visualization, saving democracy with Svelte. That was not the title. 
[00:24:05] SW: I think that was my tweet about it. I just kind of like, “What the hype, man?” on Twitter.
[00:24:12] KA: That was a good talk. It’s always nice seeing data viz in Svelte.
[00:24:16] AJ: And then also giving to the two recent IPOs for data exploration company. That’s super interesting, isn’t it, because it’s kind of a hot topic right now. Well, the Snowflake is one. You know Snowflake.
[00:24:27] KA: No.
[00:24:28] AJ: Well, Snowflake recently did a big IPO and then Palantir went straight afterwards as well.
[00:24:32] KA: Palantir, I know. Isn’t that known as one of those —
[00:24:35] SW: They do a lot of defense. It’s slightly controversial. I honestly don’t believe that I have — [inaudible 00:24:42] it’d be nice to form a judgment, so I’ll try not to judge. 
[00:24:45] AJ: But yeah. So it’s interesting because that data visualization piece was specifically interesting. Just because that’s a real world use case as Svelte, pushing the bar a bit because data viz is quite difficult to get everything in a browser in a formal way is tough. The moment when you start adding loads of nodes and loads of data points, everything starts to slow down. I think therefore, you can really showcase the advantage that a compiled framework and also something that’ lightweight and well thought out as Svelte can provide to data visualization. I think that’s the perfect use case in fact,
[00:25:20] KA: I think there may be enough here. I see a lot of adoption among data viz people. Like we had Amelia Wattenberger on this podcast. Actually, during the conference, Moritz Stefaner, I enjoy his podcast, Data Stories. He’s a well-know data viz guy. Obviously, I think they use Svelte a lot for data viz at New York Times. I think there’s like French — named Echo. There’s also a data viz shop using Svelte. I think there’s enough here for like a dedicated even for Svelte data viz people. So I really focus shedding a light on this shared tools.
Pancake is another another one that didn’t get showing like this summit, but it seems like it’s picking up stream in data viz.
[00:26:03] AJ: Pancake is the one I’m thinking right — one answer where ot basically renders SVG first. So it’s actually a service side to graphing framework, which is quite rare. I think that’s quite a special feature that should be noted.
[00:26:16] KA: Data viz comp, that would be neat.
[00:26:20] AJ: Well, when Svelte Society is big enough, we can have multiple tracks, right? We can have data viz track and have the sort of deployment track.
[00:26:28] KA: We actually talked about that yesterday in the retro about having me potentially multiple tracks. I don’t think we actually decided on anything, but —
[00:26:38] SW: Yeah. I don’t think we committed to that right now, but it’s possible on the future. I think we’re very inspired by next GS Conf which is also happening yesterday. They had four tracks. I’m a bit conflicted about it, because it’s this whole. I’m very familiar with this dilemma for conference organizers. Because if you have a single-track conference, then you have a shared experience, and everyone can chat with everyone else. Whereas if you have a multitrack conference, you had more choice, but then you also give people more choice stress and you have a shared experience, where if you went to a particular conference, you don’t necessarily know that anyone else share the same experience as you did.
[00:27:15] AJ: But also, sort of on the contrary of that. I’d say that if you’ve got linear conference in there, a talk in the middle that you’re not interested in, then you’re going to sort of break up your day a bit. Whereas if you’re a data viz person, then you can kind of focus on the data viz track. Yeah, I think it has advantage and disadvantages. I also believe as Shawn mentioned that the non-fragmented experiences is a richer experience and a better experience. I would say right now, especially that, that certainly tops any reasons for having multiple tracks. 
[00:27:45] SW: I went to a conference in London where we had two tracks. There was not particular theme, it was like track A, track B. There was one talk on like, React’s Hooks. The other talk was testing in React. The entire audience just like left the testing track and just went to React’s Hooks. It was just so sad. I sat in the testing talk just out of sympathy, but I was just feeling so bad. 
[00:28:11] AJ: This also happened --
[00:28:13] KA: That’s horrible.
[00:28:14] AJ: It happened at the Bitcoin Conference where — well, blockchain, cryptocurrency conference I went to. Loads of different tracks and different tokens and stuff. Of course, the main stage got taken by Roger Ver, sharing his Bitcoin Cash that no one cared about. I’ve never seen a large room so intent in my life, because it was just about him.
[00:28:33] KA: Oh, it was empty?
[00:28:35] AJ: It was empty, because it was Bitcoin Cash and no one cares about Bitcoin Cash.
[00:28:37] KA: Wow, that’s so funny.
[00:28:41] SW: Is he the Bitcoin Jesus? Okay, we don’t have to turn this --
[00:28:45] AJ: I mean, his Bitcoin Cash — he locked onto a boat loads of them, multimillionaire but no one else cares about that code, that token.
[00:28:57] KA: It is crypto space, man.
[00:28:58] AJ: Yeah, this madness is picking up again.
[00:29:00] SW: It’s cool again.
[00:29:07] KA: I’ve been talking about this. We should do a Svelte coin.
[00:29:11] SW: Yeah.
[00:29:11] KA: Probably not. No.
[00:29:14] SW: We can bind in the browser with our REPLs.
[00:29:16] AJ: Yeah.
[00:29:18] KA: Svelte is so fast, he wouldn’t even notice.
[00:29:20] AJ: Yeah, right.
[00:29:24] SW: Quick shoutout to Annie stock. The thing I was very — I think in speaking, you always have like Service X for first animal Y. Like [inaudible 00:29:36] always has, like, Twitter for dogs or Twitter pets, something like that. It’s just like a nice, fun thing, so Netflix for cats is always a good theme. But like the extent to which she committed to this theme was really impressive. Because she has basically cat versions of every single popular movie. Like Meow-vatar, Game of Paws, Eat, Purr, Leap. Yes, which is great.
[00:30:03] KA: And the talk was nice as well, like the intro was also with the flying like StarWars like cats and I don’t know. Pretty neat.
[00:30:13] SW: Yeah. Conferences are mixed of entertainment and education, and maybe sometimes we skew too much towards like education or just like — I don’t want to stare at code screen all the time.
[00:30:27] KA: I agree. More creativity is nice. It’s like the talk from Svelte Society today, like back in spring, the creative coding session was awesome.
[00:30:41] AJ: It’s super nice to get — to convey a complex messages well with something like cats. I think that’s quite a skill. It keeps it more digestible.
[00:30:50] KA: There are couple of other talks as well, like the, so you want to pick a router? That was great on like pretty much the fundamentals of routers, and his router as well. We also had on modern fetch in Svelte using stores. Also a great like example of a custom store, I think
[00:31:10] AJ: And it’s something that I think a lot of people talk about as well is, how can I basically build data fetching into my store. That’s to cover off a few questions.
[00:31:22] KA: Very good example. So there’s actually one talk on this Svelte Summit website that wasn’t in the conference. I don’t know if you guys noticed, but Learn Svelte Using React. That talk was —
[00:31:35] SW: You’ll release it today/
[00:31:36] KA: Yes, I’m going to release it today. Unfortunately, I didn’t — there was some issue with getting the file to me. So he had uploaded it on some service that didn’t allow it to be downloaded, so I didn’t have time to sort that out, unfortunately. So we’re going to release that as a bonus episode. 
A few more talks, we have Unlocking the Power of Svelte Actions. Yeah. This is the one.
[00:32:04] AJ: A favorite then?
[00:32:05] SW: Definitely like that one.
[00:32:05] KA: Yeah.
[00:32:06] SW: I think he actually have really good ideas for action that I’ve never thought about. People like use CSS.
[00:32:13] KA: Yeah. I think also, also like the fact that you can use the life cycle hooks inside of the actions is not something I considered like after update for example or it was after update, right? I don’t know remember. But yeah, great talk and good ideas for actions as well. Then the last talk we have Introduction to Svite as well and the Svelte Animations.
[00:32:40] SW: I think he felt a little bit blindsided by the Sveltekit. Maybe that could have been communicated a little bit better. I mean, I’ve enjoyed Svelte and Svite.
[00:32:51] AJ: Yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve also — they’ve all sort of this other frameworks of hats of very valuable ideas that we’re considering heavily when building Sveltekit. We’ve now got all these people that are involved to some extent, so hopefully it’s more palatable to them that we’ve kind of taken a bit of their crown away. But now I think they’re all happy to help up, because obviously, it’s flustering that the best possible experience for Svelte user. So yeah, it’s all working well. I appreciate that it feels like blindsiding. The problem of course is that you can’t really pre-announce something before it exists. Rich did go away and build Sveltekit, what you sort of saw in that demo in a ridiculous equipped time as his kind of his ammo. But I mean it sort of head of nowhere.
For us too, based on kind of descriptions we’ve been having and mulling over for a long time recently appeared, which is great. It’s very hard to announce when you also don’t know about it yourself. But yeah, absolutely but it should hopefully sort of bring some of these ideas together as well to make something really cool and nice. I’m looking forward to it as well.
[00:34:00] KA: Yeah, same here. We had a couple of beginner talks as well, like the The Zen of Svelte. That was nice. Like the intro talk by Morgan.
[00:34:11] SW : It was very set, and I think he did his research. He put in some previous talks from Rich, the coffee cup was based. I’m not sure what he learned from it. 
[00:34:21] KA: The production value was not, like it looked so good with like the moving TV background and a 
[00:34:28] SW: It’s probably like a DSLR or something
[00:34:30] KA: Yeah. Then we had also Prototyping Testing Real Data. That was Daniel. He’s the guy who’s doing the newsletter as well.
[00:34:40] SW: That’s right. I’m pretty keen on like making the newsletter more of a thing so that we as a community don’t only stay on discord and Twitter. I think there’s probably a lot more people to reach beyond just discord and Twitter.
[00:34:53] KA: All right. So the last talk of the conference was Rich’s Futuristic Web Development. That was new to everyone pretty much.
[00:35:02] SW: Just to set the context for people who may not know the back story. When we organized this conference, like we put out a bunch of CFPs and we’re always like — obviously, Rich is always on the table, and just like, “Hey, if you’re free. We know you’re busy and there’s an election going on. There’s more important things in the world than a GS Framework Conference. But if you ever want to submit something.” I think he like never responded on that, unlike a week before.
[00:35:30] KA: No, it was less than that. I think it was just like two or three days or something. No, more. Yeah, maybe it was a week. It was very like short notice for sure, but we managed to get at it. So that was nice.
[00:35:45] AJ: Well, it’s funny because I guess around that time, he said, “I’m going on a holiday.” So he went on holiday, then when he came back Svelte was written. So I’m not sure what kind of holiday it was.
[00:35:54] KA: I think we can probably ask him about it on our next episode that’s going on.
[00:35:59] SW: Oh, yeah. Teaser. We actually booked it for next week.
[00:36:01] KA: Yeah, we could touch on this I guess, like what is Sveltekit? Can you give us an overview, Antony?
[00:36:10] AJ: I can. Sveltekit as it currently stand, and again, we’ve not really said much about it. It is still kind of closed off to that sort of public view. The reason being that it’s very hard to work on something when you’ve got a lot of people weighing in at the same. Right now, we have a bunch of maintainers and it’s really difficult to say to have everything everyone else involved as well would be extremely difficult and it probably wouldn’t move.
I think what we’ve don’t is we tried to close off, build something, build a kind of baseline and then produce that baseline. What that baseline currently looks like is essentially a serverless framework. It will handle — we’re very modular, so everything is bunch of modules clipped together. The idea of being kind of pulled in and pulled out where you want. It will essentially do we hope as much as possible, it will be like for Sapper right now. So making the migration path from Sapper to Sveltekit very simple. It’s has various obstructions over deployment, so solving that problem, I’ve built this application, where do I put it, how do I post it. More that kind of is almost built in as a first-class citizen by our adapters, which people know a little bit about, that will take the compiled output of the Svelte app project, the Sveltekit project and turn that into a specific layout manifest, and that it can be deployed to a variety of providers. 
That’s the current status quo and it can handle completely static vended things, it can handle dynamic pages. I believe what we’ve got to know is a point where you can actually have an application composed of both those types of things. Yeah, I guess the reason you’ve not heard too much about it and there’s not been like a roadmap publicly or anything is, because that brings along with it a level of commitment. And given the schedules, the ever-changing schedules of the maintainers and the people working on this — they are not maintainers right now. What that means is, we end up with over committing and publishing a schedule that probably won’t come to fruit in the way it will, and potentially promising things that never materialized or when they appeared very different. It’s intentionally kind of a vague idea with a little preview right now of what it looks like.
By all means, run the node modules, play around with it, do what you can. But right now, the best thing to do is just accept that that’s how it is, and when we get to making it public. It will be a very exciting time because everyone kind of investigate how it works. We expect a huge influx of modules based on people have been saying, so that’s pretty exciting. I just hope that day comes sooner rather than later.
[00:38:49] KA: Let’s hope it comes soon, yeah. So if you try this out, don’t like post about bugs on GitHub about it, probably, right?
[00:38:58] AJ: Yeah. The likelihood is the bug is known by us. The likelihood is the bug by the time you write that GitHub issue, it would have completely change any way, so the bug will not be relevant. That’s kind of the — 
[00:39:08] SW: Then new bug.
[ 00:39:09] AJ: Well, yeah, there’d be plenty of bugs. For every bug we can create two bugs, right? But yeah, it’s a rapidly changing landscape with no particular kind of — I wouldn’t say it’s directionless but it’s obviously, there’s a lot of different directions and experiments going on. There will be bugs. There are definitely dragons, which is a famous Rich’s phrase I believe.
[00:39:30] SW: Actually, mentioned at Pop a couple, because I work in like public communications, so I know that this is the point where we talk about frequently asked questions. The first thing is the fear, uncertainty and doubt from essentially deprecating Sapper and not having a replacement. It’s important to understand that the maintainers is Sveltekit and Sapper are the same people. They have large production apps like Antony, and they are very keen on smooth migration path. Rich is also very aware that like living Sapper and then go like this is for a long time isn’t a good thing for Svelte. He wants it in weeks rather than months. That’s the first FAQ.
The second FAQ is also why not Svite and why SnowPack. I think the main answer is, Svite is to tied into the view ecosystem and SnowPack is more agnostic. Those are two FAQs that I saw on Twitter. 
[00:40:25] AJ: Yeah, it’s an interesting question because obviously Svite works and it’s really good. The fact is that if we start depending on external things, then we can’t make the decisions that we want to make in the most optimal way because we’re always at the behalf of some other person, who may be have different interest than we do. So yeah, not a slight on Svite or whatever it’s called I think is brilliant but it has some beta decisions that you can’t change and we need to have the flexibility change in decisions. SnowPack is excellent. It’s one of those things —
[00:40:56] KA: It definitely makes sense.
[00:40:58] AJ: Yeah, and SnowPack is heading at the exact direction we want to be in, so yeah. But again, like SnowPack is not set in stone, it’s looking very probably right now, but it’s not set in stone. Everything is still very much influx.
[00:41:09] SW: This is our second event, conference, whatever you call it online. The first time around, the Svelte Society Day in April. I think something that we did last time that we didn’t do this time was this live REPL offs. Because there’s more live, we could actually interact with Kev as he was struggling to keep his internet up. 
[00:41:16] AJ: Sweating profusely.
[00:41:38] SW: We had some fun countdown timer challenges. And then this time around, I try to get it started again, but it actually picked a challenged that was too hard. But I think it’s something that — it’s a tradition unique to us that we’ll probably try to keep up next time.
[00:41:51] KA: I think I’m pretty much decided on doing this like in a more live version next time. So going back to Svelte Society Day style but using something like StreamYard that doesn’t really rely on my connection, so we can avoid the technical issues. Even if we do get some technical issues, I think that’s fine. I think it’s wort to trade off.
[00:42:18] AJ: People are very undertstanding.
[00:42:19] KA: Yeah, and it’s worth to trade off of getting like these live, fun, kind of sort of games going between the talks. I think that the route we’ll be taking. Speaking of doing that, there will be another Svelte Summit in Spring.
[00:42:33] SW: Oh, we’re saying Spring now. Okay. I didn’t know.
[00:42:38] KA: I guess I just decided it as well.
[00:42:40] SW: I mean, I also posted the Mount Fuji thing.
[00:42:44] KA: Oh yeah, you did with hush emoji, like the shush — like the keep quite --
[00:42:49] SW: The hush. Nobody saw it. But no, I think we enjoyed it. I think it’s a good thing for this whole community. It got a lot of attention for people who don’t currently use Svelte. I think this is something that we’re doing a good job for and we want to keep up the momentum.
[00:43:07] KA: Yeah, it was super fun, and next time, it will be even more fun because I don’t have to do like the manual emailing and stuff, so it will be great.
[00:43:17] SW: Some other things more, we want more woman speakers. We only had Annie this time. I think we’re going to make more of an effort to invite more women, and just make it clear that they’re explicitly welcome and to showcase their talents. I tried to contact some others, but I think I did it too last minute, so we didn’t manage to do it this time. But it’s a priority for us. The event was kind of long, it’s like seven hours, and definitely, people were kind of tired by the end. So we all just went to sleep instead of having like an after-party. Probably we’re going to make it shorter. That means a bit more selection pressure than it was this time around.
I think there should be more room for non — like it shouldn’t be just twice a year our conference. It should be like small meet-ups elsewhere as well. We can host everything on YouTube channel and spread the knowledge. I’m very keen on like what can we do outside of the conference.
[00:44:12] KA: I don’t know many other frameworks that have kind of a specific YouTube channel for their stuff in the same way that Svelte Society does. I think that’s probably something we can leverage in a good way.
[00:44:28] SW: Yeah. YouTube is the second biggest search engine, so we should dominate SEO –
[00:44:31] AJ: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
[inaudble 00:44:34] KA: Are we going to start doing some black hat CEO now on like keywords stuffing and all of that. I know nothing about that.
[00:44:43] SW: Learn CSS 101 and it just Svelte without telling you.
[00:44:47] KA: Yeah. Well, that’s awesome. All right. Let’s move on to picks.
[00:44:55] AJ: Picks.
[00:44:55] KA: Antony was very excited. He —
[00:44:58] AJ: I’m very excited. My pick bizarrely is the British plug, right, it’s the UK plug. And the reason that is the pick is because it was — I was recently reminded. I knew about this anyway, but I was reminded that this is the best plug design in the world. The reason being is because of all the safety features it has. For instance, the longer earth pin that opens the slots for the live and neutral. So when you’re putting the plug in, because it looks kind of junky and too oversized and stuff. When you’re putting in, there’s no change of you touching that life pin because the gates aren’t open, there’s no connection. Until it’s far enough end that your finger wouldn’t get there. That’s pretty cool. It’s big and chunky like this. They’re usually this size. I know that Apple tend to refuse them. But so that you can get a good grip on it and pull it out, and that’s fantastic.
Obviously, the old [inaudible 00:45:47]. There’s like a million things [inaudible 00:45:53] built in this plug, and the net result was it’s not particularly pretty but it really works well. I think the other thing is, you can buy these kit free adapters to put into your plug sockets and you can buy [inaudible 00:46:05] here and stuff like that. People put them in there and they block the holes on the socket. But there’s actually an empty pattern in that, right? Because the sockets have this health and safety built in. The gates are closed, you can’t run anything in the holes unless you open the earth first, then run something in the whole. That’s not going to happen. A kid is not going to do that by accident. Those little adapters, plug sockets are actually anti-patent because there’s a potential to actually try and remove them, break them off, leaving the gates for the live and neutral open. They’re actually worse and less safe than not having anything in the sockets, which just blows my mind, why is that and why is that I think.
They’re all fuse as well. They all have a fuse in them. [inaudible 00:46:46] there’s a fuse in there and it’s left there. It’s a great design. I think it’s just — it’s like a 10-bit but it’s worth noting that this is a genuinely good plug design, we’re not just — we don’t just love being ugly. Things sticking out the walls. But yeah, that’s my pick. 
[00:47:04] KA: Nice. That’s a strange pick.
[inaudible 00:47:07] SW: I know. I love that you’re passionate about this. 
[inaudible 00:47:09] AJ: Yes.
[inaudible 00:47:12] KA: It’s good appreciate the design of everyday things, the classic book. I think it’s picking up again with 99% Invisible, the podcast that also focuses on the design of everyday things. I think they just put on a book, so much so that my dad heard about it. I was like, “Wow. You heard about it, that must mean it hit the mainstream.” The only follow-up question I have is, you know the American plugs, usually there are two pins, but there’s a three-pin version. Does it do the same thing? Because it kind of has the long line.
[inaudible 00:47:38] AJ: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think it does. You’ll see that you haven’t got this — you see this, like I’ve got this plastic bit on the pins here. So that even if I got it halfway and I stick my finger there, I can’t touch the actual pin. I see yours doesn’t have that.
[inaudible 00:47:52] KA: It doesn’t, no. None of that have that.
[inaudible 00:47:55] AJ: But also, without the earth, the US plug tend to wobble out the world, isn’t it? I remember seeing that in America when I was there.
[inaudible 00:48:04] KA: Plug are hard. I’m not defending it, I’m just — I’m curious.
[inaudible 00:48:08] AJ: No, no. When I was mentioning — well, we were taking about this the other day with some friends actually. That’s what we do, okay. That’s just who we are essentially. He’s in Australia and they also have a similar plug design to us now, a bit more recently obviously, but it’s actually based on an early design of the US plug from 1972, I think. But all it is is exactly US plug, but the pins are twisted slight diagonal, right, so that it doesn’t fall out the wall as easily and it has an earth pin. I believe and I can’t verify this, because he wasn’t entirely sure, but I think it also has the gate system so that the earth pin opens the two other gates. But yeah, so the Aussies are up there with it, but come on, this is the best one. This is why it’s in Hong Kong as well, right?
[inaudible 00:48:58] KA: I’d argue it’s the European one is better, but yeah, that’s just me. Anyway, my pick is almond butter. Have you guys had almond butter? It’s the best nut butter you can get. Love it. Recently, I’ve been like doing --
[00:49:15] SW: How many nut butters are there?
[00:49:16] KA: One for each nut. So peanut butter --
[00:49:21] SW: That did not come where you intended it.
[inaudible 00:49:22] KA: No, no, sorry. Peanut butter, almond butter, pistachio butter, peacan butter, macadamia butter.
[inaudible 00:49:32] SW: Have you scientifically trialed all of this in a blind test?
[inaudible 00:49:34] KA: I have not, not. But I love them, like I’ve recently been eating a lot of smoothies and nut butters go very well with smoothies.
[inaudible 00:49:46] AJ: They are good in smoothies. That’s a good pick. So interesting, because my wife is now doing sort of dairy-free stuff and using these butters and these milks as alternatives. I would love to share in that with her and support her, but this — especially almond butter, I think it is and soy milk or soy yogurt, it has a very bad effect to my stomach. So I have to stick with dairy. It’s a good job I’m not intolerant, because a lot of those butters are not good with me at all. But yeah, they’re quite delicious actually, especially almond ones.
[00:50:18] KA: Cashew butter is another nice one.
[00:50:21] SW: I feel like I’ve been not adventurous enough with my butter. 
[00:50:24] KA: You haven’t tried these things. You should definitely —
[00:50:27] SW: I’m still at the margarine, butter boundary. I’m not on the advanced stages of specialized butter.
[00:50:33] AJ: Have you had peanut butter?
[00:50:35] SW: Yeah, yeah, but I don’t like it. It’s too sweet, to sticky.
[00:50:38] KA: Really?
[00:50:39] SW: Yeah. You know there’s a special phobia for peanut butter, because it sticks into the back of your mouth.
[00:50:44] AJ: It is cloggy. It is cloggy.
[00:50:46] KA: It does get stuck in your mouth, right?
[00:50:49] AJ: The whole earth one is great, because the whole earth was just — there is no like palm oil or anything in it. It’s just ground up peanuts. That one is not sweet, it’s not salty because they didn’t put any salt in there or anything.
[00:50:59] KA: Yeah. If you do a get a nut butter, you should definitely get one that’s just 100% of the particular nut.
[00:51:07] SW: Okay. This is the peanut butter podcast. Arachibutyrophobia, that’s the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.
[00:51:16] AF: Interesting name?
[00:51:17] SW: It’s a common thing. It’s —
[00:51:21] KA: I can see that.
[00:51:22] SW: There’s two phobias that I’ve memorized. That one and the hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is the fear of long words.
[00:51:30] AJ: Yeah,
[00:51:30] KA: Ironic. So Shawn, what’s your pick?
[00:51:36] SW: Okay. My pick is the opposite. So after you had your almond butter, then you should workout more. So my pick is working out. I did a poll on Twitter. How often are you working out right now? Forty-three percent out of 3,000 votes said they’re not working out at all. Obviously, there’s a lot of stress going on with life, with working at home, but at some point, it becomes an excuse, and we still have to care of ourselves no matter what the situation. And I definitely was not doing that, I’m not judging other people because I was also not working out, but I started working out again [inaudible 00:52:08]. I’m feeling better and I just want to encourage and remind people that they can do it. Go from zero to one time a week. About 27% of people work out three to five times a week, and that’s probably the right amount, so just keep doing that.
[00:52:21] KA: Awesome.
[00:52:22] AJ: Yeah, I think that’s a good one. Because I actually work out more during lockdown and it’s occurred to me how little I worked out before lockdown. So yeah, definitely worth getting into.
[00:52:31] KA: Yeah, I think there are memes like circulating around where you’re like, it’s like the pre-COVID sort of picture of a cartoon man, and then there’s an after picture. It’s either like this huge fat person or it’s like the super muscular one. So you either go down the path of working out a lot more or you go down the path of eating a lot more. I think that that kind of hold true for a lot of people. For example, me, I have trouble doing things in moderation. I always do things 100%.
[00:53:03] SW: So reminder to be healthy, and to eat well and to no electrocute yourself. That’s from us today.
[00:53:10] KA: Definitely, and also eat almond butter. All right. And on that note —

Episode source