What's new in Sveltia?

We talk about what's new with SvelteKit, how to contribute and other news in Svelteland!

This week Karine joins us to discuss community, news and other Svelte related things. Have a listen.

Notes:
- Newsletter (sign up to the unofficial mailing list here)
- rollup-plugin-svelte changes CSS defaults
- Crown Framework and the site built using it.
- Ruby on Rails Doctrine

Picks:
- Shawn: Mandalorian
- Kevin: reMarkable 2
- Antony: Asus PN50
- Karine: Queen's Gambit

Transcription:
Kevin  0:00  
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Svelte radio. Today we're going to discuss what's happened in Svelte these last few weeks, maybe months. But first, some introductions. I'm Kevin, I run Svelte school. I'm heavily involved in the Svelte community. And yeah, that's me.

Shawn  0:20  
Hey, everyone. I'm Shawn. I work at AWS and I mostly should post on Twitter. That's my job.

Antony  0:28  
Hey, I'm Anthony. I'm a maintainer of Svelte and I am the CTO of beyond. Nice.

Kevin  0:35  
And today we're joined by none other than Ah, Hi,

Karine  0:39  
I'm Karine. And I work in Seneca in France and I'm the CO organiser of Svelte society day France.

Shawn  0:48  
Oh, welcome, welcome. 

Antony  0:50  
And you have a cool discord name as well. 

Shawn  0:52  
K6 what is Yeah, what is key six?

Karine  0:54  
Oh, it's just because Karine is six letters and K6 is shorter 

Antony  0:58  
It's the thing right is Kubernetes

Shawn  1:03  
Numeruneum. There's a term for that 

Antony  1:05  
numeruneum. I see!

Kevin  1:07  
I did not know that.

Shawn  1:09  
For those who may not know actually so Corinne basically organise society day you run Svelte society, France, and it was just like a beginning to end. I wasn't sure if like Svelte was ready for like a non English conference. But you just did it. And then you got so many submissions. Even got rich to say some French.

Karine  1:31  
A very memorable moment. That's been recorded. Oh, right.

Kevin  1:35  
You can see that online. Right.

Karine  1:37  
Yeah. On the YouTube channel.

Shawn  1:39  
Yeah, I mean, I think there is a French community. I think Schneider Electric, they get back I was speaking in French. Then there was like the the newspaper like, was it les echos?

Karine  1:49  
Yes, Les Echos, Yes. And they do lots of infographics, papers. Some of them are powered with Svelte animation. I think there's also a radio france, which is the well the broadcaster of many different radios. And they they use Svelte in some part, and they have a very, I just tweeted recently, an article by their tech, tech lead, and they have a very interesting and modern stack, including Svelte.

Antony  2:23  
Wow. I mean, radio, France has clearly sort of got their inspiration from start radio.

Kevin  2:30  
Obviously, it's cool. Speaking of Svelte, what's new with the Svelte lately? Anyone know,

Shawn  2:40  
there's some versions.

Kevin  2:42  
Exciting.

Antony  2:44  
So we've we've definitely started publishing a newsletter. I don't know exactly who's involved in that. But somebody sort of started publishing announcements, because I think we mentioned on here that we never announced any new features, we just kind of rolled them out. And it's good to sort of get a bit of notice and traction around around the version. So there is no newsletter. I'm terrible, because I don't know where it lives or how to see it. But it's probably on the blog. Right. It's on the stock blog, which was abandoned for a long time, but but it's on there. It lives again.

Shawn  3:11  
So I suspect this is like a tear. Yeah, so Svelte dot dev slash blog. The thing about this newsletter is that there's no place to sign up. What what kind of

Antony  3:21  
like, it's like a blog, news block. You can't You can't syndicate a write

Shawn  3:28  
it there's, I don't see an RSS Yeah, there's

Kevin  3:30  
no rss,

Antony  3:32  
unsubscribable.

Shawn  3:33  
If you want to contribute to Svelte you know what to do.

Antony  3:37  
Yeah, that would be a very good, very good first thing, actually, because this is stored as a bunch of markdown. So there's no reason this can't be syndicated pretty easily. Yeah, so so new, feature wise. I mean, I mean, everyone's everyone's sort of focused on Svelte kit right now. But in the background, there are some new features going into Svelte itself.

Kevin  3:55  
I think we've had a number of like smaller point releases, right? 

Antony  4:00  
Yeah, 

Kevin  4:01  
with some new features like props, rest, props, and custom web components is one of them.

Antony  4:08  
And it's just I think there's just some syntactic sugar around the promise, like the await syntax, just to keep your code clean a bit cleaner. I'm still not a fan. putting away in your template. It doesn't feel doesn't sit well with me. But for those who use it, I guess it's really kind of a terse way of just making sure your data is ready. And then they're pumping out to the page. So this is good. Yeah it's good that that is getting some love 

Kevin  4:32  
some, some other stuff as well?

Shawn  4:34  
I should mention Karine has in the chat. You can speak Karine. I think you found the signup link.

Karine  4:40  
Yeah. It's it's Svelte that substack.com and there you have the sign up for the newsletter and Oh, that's a different clever link. It's okay. It's, you know, it's

Kevin  4:53 
it. It is the same but like we, I guess you kind of want the like an official signup thing because This is run by the guy that writes it, I think, okay, which is fine. I suppose.

Shawn  5:04  
that's good enough. Better than us maintaining a separate mailing list.

Antony  5:09  
Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, that's that's nice about it to be honest.

Karine  5:13  
So now Antony you can subscribe.

Antony  5:16  
Now that what's going on, we should be really useful.

Shawn  5:19  
I just very keen on email capture. I'm like the next conference that we do we need to have emails. 

Antony  5:24  
Yeah, absolutely. 

Shawn  5:25  
Activate people. All right. So I guess maybe the one surprise because I haven't seen this before. I would want surprise I was rollout plugin Svelte removed the CSS option, 

Antony  5:36  
They did

Shawn  5:37  
This is surprising Why?

Antony  5:38  
It's not a question I can answer. Again. I didn't work on that plugin. And I think now i don't i don't know. But yes, I know that you have to specify a specific CSS plugin for it. Now. It's cool to come people out because they're just sort of upgrading major versions without realising that. It caught me out. And we're gonna try and diagnose them in the book. But yes, that's the case. There'll be there'll be a bug somewhere that tells you exactly why it's been done. Yeah. It changes on that,

Shawn  6:03  
apparently, and it was discussed in Discord. So it's PR number 147 on Rollup plugin Svelte, and they just want to handle CSS within rollup. So cool. All right. So this metric changes. I mean, I often been thinking about how you know how Svelte in tailwind is a little bit hard to set up. I've often been thinking about adapting or forking the roll up or Webpack loader and just incorporating it by default, so that it would be zero setup. I don't know if I haven't needed it. I mean, when I start my next project, I'll probably do that. But if anyone else wants to steal the idea, please be my guest.

Kevin  6:42  
Isn't that kind of what Svelte kiss kit is

Shawn  6:45  
sorry, I'm doing. We're not we're not digging in post CSS and stuff like that.

Kevin  6:50  
Oh, no, no, but like the no build, or sorry, no, no setup stuff. I mean, speaking of Svelte kit,

Antony  6:57  
Speaking of Svelte kit. 

Kevin  6:59  
What's new?

Antony  7:00  
I can tell you kind of what's going on literally right now as we speak. So in terms of what I've been doing, I've been working on the Vercel and the begin plugins, the adapters. So those are now Vercel works really well. The begin one doesn't quite serve static assets yet, but it will leave very soon when now because they've been very helpful. Both these both these people, both these providers have their have their people on our Discord. And we're on their slacks and stuff. And they're collaborating with us because they really want they're really eager to make everything a first class citizen. So I think both beginning wsl will have baked in support for Svelte kit, and it'll be a matter of just pushing it. And it works rather than the kind of custom created driven adapters and things like that. So that's pretty exciting. They're both big fans of it, the netlify adapter has been rewritten as well. So what happened with adapters as a whole was they went from a kind of more manual process of taking the snowpack output, and compiling bits of it building manifests wiring that up into a format that each type of provider could use such as lambda, one day, rich came along and simplified the whole thing. And now there's like a builder, which just has a bunch of methods, you can call like four methods, one for static files, one for client files, one for SSR content, and they will just basically provide you all of this stuff as a file system, you can then drop in the right place, and then you have a lambda to serve it. So adapters got radically simpler, which should mean that people building their own can do it in a predict less than hour, maybe depending on how well you know the host you're going for. So it's pretty exciting. You won't need any specific knowledge, it's pretty, the API is pretty verbose and straightforward. Language wise, in terms of the application, like SvelteKit itself, is just getting more and more polished. So obviously, it started out as a bit of prototype, it's now becoming very much like, like for like for sapper, we're having some discussions around testing strategies, and perhaps making testing a first class citizen. So we've in the past kind of shied away from a bit because we don't want to enforce a specific testing methodology or bless something like Cyprus, or QA wolf or any of these providers, or libraries, because it kind of puts us in a position where we're advertising something without really having any say over it. But what we're going to do is provide a way to make it a one step journey. When you want to write tests. There's not like, Well, you can't test it. That's that it's more, go and look at these. Here's some suggestions. Here's some options. One interesting thing that happened was from the actual codebase itself Svelte kit, TypeScript was removed entirely not for the supporting on the outside but removed from the code itself. And the reason that happened was because when we're prototyping mostly when Rich is prototyping, actually, the types kind of become more of a hindrance than a help. It's like, you know, you wouldn't write prototype and then cover it in unit tests, because we can get in the way. So the plan is now if you know, we release this into the public domain, at some point soon, people might be shocked. Where's all the TypeScript gone kind of thing but what's actually going to happen is we're going to add it Afterwards, when the API is more stable, and then we're going to have, you know, all the types available to make developing it really, you know, simple and exciting. So, so yeah, there's a few things that have gone on a few things more controversial than others. What else has happened? You know, it's one of those things that sort of every day I wake up and everything's changed. So it's not a bit like that. Yeah, there's nothing else that I can sort of say that I've been absolutely all over. Yeah. And we're having discussions about CSS. So that's good. And there's also discussion on image processing, whether we provide a plug in or not, not sure. But snowpack can do this sort of stuff. So it's possible that maybe there's a chance that there'll be a sort of guide to say, instal the snow pack plug in. And there you go, you can process images.

Kevin  10:43  
Cool. So that's Svelte kit. What's happening in the community? Like, did you guys see the website by the HyberLab guys? It's like they made an e commerce site with the sock

Antony  10:57  
crown framework,

Karine  10:58  
the Swedish history, brand of clothing.

Kevin  11:02  
Yeah, exactly. I actually go on to the website, sometimes to just experience the speediness and snappiness

Antony  11:09  
it is really nice. It is a really nice site. Actually, on the on that subject I used there, they've written a, an error boundary component is something actually I think, personally, I'd like to see added into Svelte but essentially a way of demarcating an area of the of your page or component where any error is thrown a call and you can handle them independently, everything else. They weren't bubble up and break the whole site, is a bit of a monkey patch at the moment sort of goes in and changes internals, it might not might not work the same way forever and ever, never. But it's definitely a good indicator of how it can be done. And it does work about to start using in production. So fingers crossed. Wish me luck. But that's Yeah, that's quite a crown framework. So that's pretty cool.

Karine  11:48  
Well, I was wondering, we are similar people wondering how how people can contribute to Svelte kit, the core Svelte kits, and how do you maybe screen people? Is there a process? Or how does that happen? For contributing

Antony  12:05  
So I guess the main contributor right now is rich, it turns out that the way that works best for Svelte and has historically is that rich goes away and scrolls away and does something and then comes out with a with a product. And then people jump on afterwards, that's kind of happened, it's it's difficult to get a lot of people around something when it's in such an early stage with a lot of movement. I'm doing adapters, because they're quite isolated and separate most of the codebase. And people are contributing various things. So Ben was looking at the TypeScript stuff. He's doing all the build tooling, things like that. There's lots of other contributors, but the, the core is mostly Svelte maintainers. The reason being that with probably like, 16 of those 20 years, right now, with just those opinions, it's very hard to come to consensus on stuff. If we then throw in the whole community, it gets really hard to come to consensus, and the whole thing could grind to a halt. So I think until something foundational is there, it will be kind of private, hopefully not for too much longer. The other thing we've done is we have added some contributors from other projects. So you asked how outsiders can get in and contribute. We've added contributors from projects like our you know, all the kind of projects doing similar things. So Svite, for example, Elder.js, for example, anyone with ideas about how something fundamental would work, and who already has an implantation of it was invited to come and get on board and join in because they can provide that sort of the insights have already gained. Outside of that we've got people from Vercel, Begin there. Also, they have access to the code and they're able to review it. That's mostly to make sure that we're doing things that are saying when trying to ensure their platforms. Apart from that, there's pretty much no one else, there's no one else. There's no one else from outside who's contributing just yet. There's a bunch of people trying it out equally and being very confused at why it changes day to day. But yeah, so the idea is to go into a sort of an alpha stage soon, where we'll open up the repository, the source code, I guess, and then have some maybe installation instructions. And then on top of that, we'll have a repository that just handles issues that isn't the main repository, so that people can log and triage things that are affecting them. These will then be filtered and raised in the main repository where we can handle them. Hopefully, that period won't last too long. It will just be some ironing out some basic issues and then we'll have the the kind of proper open public beta, where everyone can jump in and get involved in contributing. I'm sure we'll have a million adapters for everything under the sun very, very quickly. Yeah. 

Karine  14:34  
Okay. And are you planning on maybe having some kind of guidelines or, um, I remember back then, when I was working on rails, Ruby on Rails, they had that doctrine that was like the the, the 10 commandments of rails that guides you from what you will do and what you won't do what you're willing to compromise on. T

Antony  14:57  
That's a good idea. We don't have any more Like that, traditionally, we're very, very bad at providing contributing guidelines. If somebody wants to write these, that's fantastic. We definitely would like to have that I think we need it even internally in the maintainers. Because Svelte is in a position where it is actually quite a complex concept is doing something that not lower the frameworks are doing, and it makes things a lot harder. And even within the maintainers, there's, there's not a huge spread of knowledge. There's a bunch of people who know certain areas. So it's definitely something we'd want to have. We just don't have it as yet. So yeah, that's a good way to contribute that Hey,

Karine  15:34  
girls with with, I have the impression that this is a very opinionated language or framework. I don't know which term defines it best. But yeah, it's really at the image of rich, actually, which she who is someone who's very opinionated. So usually, yeah, they're probably some boundaries that you don't want to be crossed. Sometimes.

Antony  15:58  
There, there probably are. But I think the word boundaries is in itself, maybe a bit, a bit anti rich, because if you talk to rich, what he will say is, don't try and confine yourself to boundaries, think outside the box. And that's how you can wake up with great ideas, everything that he does this kind of against conventions, sticking things in node modules that aren't from NPM, for example, that sort of thing. They those are not within any boundaries. So I think you'd actually invite people to come and give their own opinions and views on things. Obviously, people open prs and things get merged. And things don't make sense or wouldn't be good. Just not going to get motional get a lot of feedback saying this probably won't work because of x and y. But I think I think any contributing guidelines given would be more along the lines of where to find things, what to get going with what's easy, what's hard, why things are done a certain way. And I think you could reverse that maybe by saying, as somebody who wants to contribute, what would you be concerned about? What would you want to know? And from that maybe we can build contributing guidelines based upon what we know of, you know how it is.

Shawn  17:01  
I should probably also mention that you don't have to contribute to Svelte core, you can also contribute in other ways, like organising meetups.

Kevin  17:09  
Yeah. Svelte society website. We got some some prs. Right. Yeah, yeah,

Shawn  17:14  
we got a PR from MAC FPGA on GitHub. I don't know their real name. But yeah, they we now have a working components filter search thing on the spot society, Dev nice. And we need more recipes. We just I'm you know, all of us are just volunteering time. But it's one way to demonstrate that you collaborate and are interested in Svelte and I think that's one way to give back to the community. You can ask her questions on discord, there's endless questions, a Stack Overflow as well. I'm not sure if people are actually searching on StackOverflow. But they're asking, asking questions, for sure. And they need to be answered.

Kevin  17:50  
All right. So this is gonna be a pretty short episode. This time,

Shawn  17:54  
I have a couple more announcements that we I don't know where we're wrapping up. So this felt jobs account came back alive. I think Noah Glaser from San Francisco is running it. So he's doing a meetup on December 9 at 7pm pacific time, you can sign up on the spot jobs account, I guess, just look for a small society, Bay Area by Noah Glazer. And then the other announcement that we should probably mention is that the state of JavaScript survey is going is going on. So obviously, we're not telling you what to vote for. If you're listening to this, we would like your your opinion to be heard. So you can hit head to state of js.com particularly, this kind of survey has historically been over represented by people who are extremely online. If you're listening to this podcast, if you're on Twitter a lot or if you're on discord, you're probably extremely online. There are a lot of developers who are not represented because they're they just do their jobs and they don't really engage that much on online community. So be great to reach them. And yeah, state of js.com it's the link there.

Kevin  18:54  
Cool. 

Antony  18:56  
I've done it already Yay,

Kevin  18:57  
you have a pick. 

Shawn  19:00  
Oh, we're doing we're doing picks. 

Kevin  19:02  
Okay, I got this new tablet today, huh? It's called a remarkable tablet. Oh, that's like $200, right? Oh, no, more like some 400 I think, Wow. Okay, it's like an ereader. But instead of reading you do or writing on it, and like converts text and you can annotate on top of PDFs and stuff. It's pretty neat 

Shawn  19:24  
Do you draw, or do you do diagrams, what do you actually use it for? 

Kevin  19:28  
So I I just got it today. So I I haven't really been using it much. But from the little I've done, I've done some annotations on PDFs pretty much highlighting stuff for arrows. You can draw on it as well.

Antony  19:43  
It's very cool. I'm thinking of asking them for Christmas but not sure Santa can afford it.

Kevin  19:49  
And the waitlist is huge. So I ordered back in like three months ago. Wow. I just got it. Yeah.

Shawn  19:58  
I can go well, the rest of you Think about your picks. I'm going to pick the Mandalorian so good. And it's Yeah, for those who don't know it's it's kind of takes place it's it's a Star Wars TV show run by me by Disney plus, and they're releasing it weekly. So it's not like the the Netflix l dub the whole season on you at once. And it's just so great to watch something together with other people and just like speculate about what's going on. I can't try not to spoil anything, but it's taking place after the the main original trilogy movies and it's just very well executed really good action. I run when I watch it. I don't even feel like I'm running. I just, I just get a good 30 to 45 minutes of exercise just watching it and it's one of the best TV shows I've seen.

Antony  20:40  
I'm gonna have to watch that. That sounds that sounds pretty good. 

Kevin  20:43  
It is good. It is good 

Shawn  20:44  
And the soundtrack. Oh my god. So good!

and the technical side as well. Have you seen the documentary?

Antony  20:51  
Yeah, I'm gonna go because I've got a pic. Again, in tradition. I'm going to pick something weird. So it's something I don't actually own is something I want to own and I spent a lot of time studying it and I hopefully will own soon. And it's the Asus, pN 50 barebones computer. It's like a tiny little desktop computer that runs a ryzen AMD ryzen processor. So I'm a massive fan of ARM processors, I really, really want an M one. But I really, really don't want to run OSX. I'm a staunch Linux user, and I will not be changed. So I'm going to be sort of stuck for arm apart from my Chromebooks and stuff for quite a while yet. So I'm going to buy this bare bones PC with a with a really fast processor in it. And hopefully, it will alleviate my problems where I can either podcast code or use discord at one time, because my machine's got eight gigs of RAM. And it's, it runs out of power pretty quickly. So yeah, my pick is going to be that machine. And hopefully in a future podcast, I will tell you how great it is. Yeah, it's surprisingly cheap, it's probably comes in at about 300 quid. So also,

Kevin  21:53  
so that that's cheaper than my tablet. 

Antony  21:56  
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's that cheap, you know, don't get memory with it, or an SSD. But I mean, those things are cheap, and probably people already have an SSD anyway. You know, and a memory memory is another 100 quid or something. So again, you spending probably half what you might spend on a laptop. And it seems to be very, very, very fast. So looking forward to that as a new death machine.

Kevin  22:15  
Yeah. Oh, wow. Check it out. Karine, Do you have? Do you have a pic?

Karine  22:20  
Ah, well, yes, I it's been a long time since I watched a TV show on Netflix. In the last one I saw and liked the loads the Queen's gambit, you've probably yes, came across that one. Because it's really a very popular. Well, I could have watched it because it's quite short. It's only seven episodes. And it's that's the story of that badass chess player, the woman, a woman that plays chess is a very high level and it takes place in the in the 60s in the 70s. And while the story is nice, you can really get you can really get into it without knowing anything about chess. And I think there was a publication stating the influence in that series on the record sales of chess boards, right, was released. And the last point I really loved about the series is the the soundtrack and takes place in the 60s and the 70s. And then the colours and the graphic treatment of that Siri, the vintage settings and the vintage looks. It's really great and refreshing. It was nice. I mean, liked it.

Kevin  23:31  
I'll have to check it out. 

Antony  23:32  
Yeah, an interesting note on that as well on Twitter last night, actually, they cast a transgender actress as the teacher and the school just as a playing a woman just just that's it. No problem at all. There was just no furor about it. There was no you know, special treatment like that. And people thought that was fantastic. Just so, so natural and great. So that's, that's pretty exciting as well. kudos to them. Alright, so

Kevin  23:54  
that's it for for this episode of the Svelte radio. Thanks for joining us, Karine,

Karine  24:00  
thank you so much for having me.

Kevin  24:01  
We hope you can join us again, for a longer episode maybe in the future. But yeah, Goodbye, everyone. Thanks for listening. Bye bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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