Svelte and Sapper in Action with Mark Volkmann

Mark Volkmann has written a great book on Svelte and Sapper. We sit down with him to talk about his background, what's in the book and some more philosophical developer stuff! Keep your out on Svelte Society twitter account. We'll be giving away two copies of the book!

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Show notes:

• Svelte and Sapper in Action book (get 35% off by using code podsvelradio20)
• Mark's blog and second blog/site

Transcription:

[00:00:00] KAK: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another Svelte Radio Podcast. Today, we have another guest with us. Before we get to that, let’s do introductions. I’m Kevin. I run Svelte School and I’m heavily involved in the Svelte Society community stuff for Svelte. Yeah, that's me.

[00:00:18] SW: I’m Shawn I work at AWS on developer experience. Most recently, I’ve also been working on finally shipping my own site in Elderjs, which is the new Svelte static site generator. It's very fast, because it basically ships almost nothing. Yeah, I really like it.

[00:00:38] AJ: Hi. I’m Antony. I’m a CTO at Beyonk, which is a platform for experienced booking. I’m also a Svelte core maintainer. I’m involve with Svelte Radio, Svelte green tea, apparently a lot of stuff that I don't know how I got involved in, but there you go. Yeah, thanks.

[00:00:55] KAK: All right. The guest for today is Mark. Mark Volkmann, is that how you say it?

[00:01:01] MV: That's correct.

[00:01:02] KAK: Yeah. What's your deal?

[00:01:05] MV: Yeah. I’m a software consultant in the St. Louis area in Missouri. I work at object computing. We provide training and consulting and all kinds of software development. These days I mostly focus on web development, but I really work in the full stack.

[00:01:22] KAK: Awesome. You've written a book on Svelte, right? It's probably why you’re here.

[00:01:26] MV: That’s right. Exactly.

[00:01:29] KAK: How was that experience?

[00:01:31] MV: It was quite challenging. I have a long history of writing. I write a lot of articles for my company that get published on our website and sent out to subscribers to those articles. I’ve been speaking at conferences and user groups for a long time and teaching classes. I had a long history of writing. This is the first time my writing has been examined this closely by a large number of reviewers. It was quite an experience trying to deal with all the feedback that I was getting.

[00:02:01] KAK: Nice. Why Svelte?

[00:02:03] MV: For me, it's all about developer experience. There's so many reasons to choose Svelte, but I really focus heavily on at least my own productivity. I find that I’m just way more productive in Svelte. A lot of that has to do with the features that are built in that make things so simple and result in you writing less code to get things done. For me, some of the top features are the way that you deal with state inside a component and the way that you share state across component using stores. Both of those are just so much simpler than what I see in any of the other web frameworks.

[00:02:41] AJ: Yeah. I like this part that actually – I liked it so much that I took a screenshot of it. In chapter five, you have this table on component communication options and you've got props, slots, events, context, module context and stores and I think that's a really good recap of how these things go. I don't know. I never had it put so clearly to me. but I do have a special preference for stores. They were the first Svelte talk that I did at the New York City Svelte Society meetup.

[00:03:08] MV: Right. When you compare it to what you have in other frameworks, like Redux and React, or Vuex and Vue, or NGRX and Angular, it's just a night and day difference in the complexity level.

[00:03:19] KAK: Yeah. Your book is pretty comprehensive. I’ve skimmed through it, read parts of it. It seems like the tutorial, but on steroids. It covers pretty much everything. It feels like a good next step after doing the tutorial.

[00:03:37] MV: Yeah, I think that's right. I would recommend that people go through the tutorial, because that's excellent. I did really aim to show almost every feature of Svelte and Sapper and have a simple code example of everything. Then show it in a wider context in a sample app that we build throughout the book.

I think, even for myself it will be a reference going forward to look up how to do various things. That's really the style of my writing on other topics is to be a reference that I can go back to when I forget how to do something, which is quite often because as developers, we have so many things to remember that we just can't – we have to have a resource to look things up from time to time.

[00:04:18] SW: Yeah. Absolutely. I noticed when I was – I was actually reading the book from when it was in more early stages, so there were obviously chunks missing, the stuff I was reading it online. I noticed that there were URLs and things like that that were probably due to go out of date pretty quickly, I just wondered as a person writing a book for something that is quite fast-moving technologically, how do you keep track of what's changed and what you need to update and what hasn't?

[00:04:41] MV: Yeah. That's a tough challenge when it comes to URLs. The editor from the publisher encouraged me to not include very many of those things. I push back on that. I understand things go out of date. I would rather have good material out initially that will go out of date than just skip it all together. My tendency was to include as much as possible, even if there was a danger of it going out of date.

An example of this is that in the chapter where I talk about different ways that you can deploy a Svelte app and I get into some details about services like Netlify, so I was listing a lot of details about the plans, including the prices. They didn't want me to inclu...