Welcome to svelte radio hello
everyone welcome back to another svelte radio episode i almost
said Svelte episode radio. That'd be wrong. I'm joined by my two co-hosts today. Anthony,
Brittany, hello.
Hello.
Hey, we're finally back,
the three of us. Back all of us together. In one
episode. That's amazing. And today we also have a guest, Ilya. I think that's how you pronounce it?
Yeah, right. Exactly. 100%. Perfect.
I did it. Great. So, Ilya, you are a
Svelte developer or a developer in general, I suppose, right?
You're very active on the Skeet site, Blue Sky.
I love it.
I mean, I really do.
It's so nice because you share a lot of stuff,
not just for Svelte, but also like some Astro stuff
because I think you use Astro.
Oh, yeah, right.
So that's nice because I have no idea what's going on in Astro.
But we invited you to talk today about NGOs and working with NGOs as a developer and stuff.
It seems like an interesting story compared to everyone else that's just working.
I have a dumb question.
What's an NGO?
Oh, right.
Perfect.
I recently gave a talk on this topic and I had a slide.
So NGO is an acronym.
It's for non-governmental organization.
and this is what people most associate with what we actually talk about which is npo and non-profit
organization because every company technically is also an ngo but yeah it's it's a bit more about
like non-profit so civic society foundations so everything which is not governmental and usually
not a company cool
so so like organizations that help out in like disaster relief or like homeless
people or like stuff like that or
wildlife saving
wildlife
just some examples i
guess
this is i think this is the more like uh yeah applied or practical um non-profit organizations
or ngos i mean there are many um mostly they are advocating for something i mean even like
like like greenpeace and its core is like a like an advocating or a company or organization which
is doing advocacy.
So
not all of them have like boots on the ground,
but
as many people with
some expertise
where the government is for whatever reason
not providing the type of service
or knowledge that they should be.
Yeah.
So we all met at Svelte Summit earlier this year.
That was a lot of fun.
And you talked about you wanted to do,
well, actually before I get into like the meetup thing,
Maybe you can just present yourself.
Who are you?
Other than working
with NGOs.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, my name is Ilya.
So I've been living in Berlin now for like 30 years.
And I switched basically careers like multiple times.
So like after high school, I joined the army for a while.
And then I quit the army.
And then I went to university.
And it's a bit similar to this USGI bill.
So basically, they paid for my bachelor's.
And that also means I can only pick one once.
And I chose a social science one.
And then towards the end of this bachelor's,
I decided that I don't want to pursue a career
in political science or something like this.
And then for my master's,
I found a place where I could do computer science as
a minor.
Interesting combination.
Yeah.
I mean, they have a term for it.
It's called computational social science.
It's basically the major is in social science.
And then you apply big data methods.
Back then, this wasn't like a big thing.
and then eventually I started doing like data visualizations as a freelancer basically also
already for NGOs and this like one thing led to another I started building interactives I started
building websites and now yeah I'm also self-hosting my stuff
nice nice
yeah we talked right
we talked
before the show started about self-hosting and and the cloud by the way by the way yeah yeah it's
It's nice.
Yeah, so I just wanted to mention,
me self-hosting did not
save me from the Cloudflare
outage
because I'm using Cloudflare tunnels.
So I'm tunneling all my traffic through Cloudflare
so I don't have to expose my IP and stuff to shady people
that want to DDoS my server.
So now I'm thinking, should I just ditch Cloudflare as well?
I don't know.
Maybe I should. Maybe I should.
So how do you, so you studied social science
and then you moved into computer science
and then data visualizations.
And I assume you found Svelte somewhere around there,
like in making visualizations or when did you discover Svelte?
Yeah, I mean, there are always a bunch of like path dependencies.
And one thing is I first heard of Svelte from Gregor Eich.
So, you know, like
the co
-founder of Data Wrapper, who
also presented
the Svelte Plot Library at the Svelte Summit.
Because in Berlin and many, like many, I think, places where there's lots of media, there is a meetup series, which is called Hacks and Hackers.
And it's developers and journalists meeting.
And back then, I was basically just following what they were doing, like interactive journalism, you know, all those impressive visuals.
And my idea was, how can I apply this in the NGO sector?
So because they have usually they have those policy papers, those reports, it's like PDFs with 30 pages or something like this.
It's just text.
But there is a story and there's data.
And how can you like help them make this become alive?
And he mentioned Svelte.
I didn't use it back then because I was just using jQuery, actually, and
11T.
And I looked into it.
As long as it works,
right?
Yeah, but it was, you know, it was still painful.
then i think i compared like a tiny component to alpine and importing alpine as a library was like
the library itself was bigger than a compiled swell component and i was like okay so that's
it basically so this is what i'm going to use and then i think during covid i also was in an online
workshop um from tan liao he he
did a swell
workshop it must have been like i don't know
five years ago or something like that and then this is how i how i picked it up because it felt
very natural to me because I knew a bit of like HTML and CSS already and you know Svelte's platform
first so it just like totally felt natural to me to
start
using it that makes sense makes sense
did I hear that right though that you were using Eleventy which is like a no JavaScript
framework and then you were putting jQuery into it
yeah but like Eleventy uses JavaScript to
compile to build a website or back then it was
so yeah but like yeah exactly no javascript on the
front end right
yeah yeah yeah and now i'm using astro as well
okay nice right
so so from from
so if
you go from from like visualizations then how did you find like how did you pivot into
ngos or like how did you end up building websites for ngos
yeah doing work for um
right so i like i didn't think about what i would be doing during my masters um and i had like two
job prospects or job opportunities and both would have been uh were related to the government and
both did not happen for reasons you cannot like imagine like in in one case there was like a
government affair on federal level and i was supposed to join as a contractor and then they
just not like didn't what is it like pay pay the money or
make the money available
for this
and the other
one is we had um we have like a think tank which is government sponsored let's
call it government sponsored
and
for it to have a budget there needs to be a government and we had
like government you know coalition negotiations and then one party withdrew and then again i knew
oh shit my job my job entry my post army post bachelors post masters entry in the market it's
not going to happen um and then coincidentally because i was also very online back then on
twitter someone who was like basically working in this space with with a vision for you know new
digital things they invited me and and just introduced me to their to their boss and i was
like oh i need maps for my book oh wow i i created maps for the book and i was like oh we need more
maps and visualizations for a report and i did those as well and then i was like okay and now
we have additional funding we would like to put it online
right i
mean i know how to put an svg
online i mean let me figure out if i can also like you know wrap it in some html with some text
and
this is this
is how it started right and like yeah this was like with eleventy and i figured out
a lot of things, learned a bit, you know, about
accessibility and responsive
design.
And, yeah, and then one thing led to another
and I was booked for other websites, web products.
So I didn't plan for it. It's just like
I
accidentally became a
web developer.
Right.
And
like this was
one
pillar
and the other pillar is because I was then
implementing interactive
visualizations, media companies
or people who are doing data
journalism they noticed me they saw this on twitter i was like hey we we need support for
a project would you like to join and like you know work on a particular um feature or component
or something like this and this is how i basically started working with with svelte as my framework
full-time
right nice nice and so so what so was it uh was it like the small bundle thing that
pulled you in initially it sounded like that when you compared it to alpine earlier
this was one like one heuristic because i had no clue like how cdns or something like that works
i was like oh no i need to get this bundle size you know down as much as
possible that
was one
thing the other thing is that um as a kid i learned html and css a bit and i was running a website but
that was like early 2000s or so
yeah and
then i didn't touch any of that i'd never learned javascript
or something like that and then when i i'm during my bachelor's i had a student job and i had to write
and CSS. So then, you know, it all came back. And then when I started working on interactive stuff
for the web, and then I saw React, I worked with React like on two or three projects. I was like,
what, what,
what the heck is
this? I mean, there's HTML and there's CSS. You just need to add some,
some behavior, you know, and there is
this,
there is state in a variable. Why is it not rendering?
Why do I need to do extra work to, to render a value of a variable?
And which felt it was
exactly
like this right yeah
yeah just like you have to have i call it a javascript brain to like
understand react you have to think about things from the javascript point of view but it's felt
like you're thinking about it like html css you have your markup just separated and you keep it
separated in your brain
yeah yeah totally agree and
then with um especially with the accessibility
linter and with all those you know bindings on on the dom element like with the the attributes
binding the disabled state binding all those bindings it felt just like so natural it's like
literally i have this state and i just want to be the state applied here and so just along the
ergonomics of writing it felt like super natural because it was just like okay i know html i know
css i just need to some state just a tiny little yeah
how do you feel about back then
um it took me two or three months to adjust but i got i have to say um matthias style from spiegel
um and i was working at the media company like two years ago i just started there and um like
the situation was very intense because like one person quit and there would be four elections
so i i
knew i
was like in for lots of trouble and matthias in april or so april 2004
And four, three, four, four.
He posted, okay, Spiegel is using Svelte 5.
And I was like, okay, I learned so much from him.
If he is going all in on Svelte 5 while
it was still
in beta,
I'm
going
to adopt it as well.
And then it really paid out.
So I'm totally happy.
I'm super happy now.
First two months were a shock, but now I'm a
believer.
Yeah, I think I had kind of a similar reaction as well.
especially when
they eliminated getter setters
like the explicit ones
there used to be
an explicit get set syntax
right, yeah
and this was the moment I was like, okay
you mentioned Matthias Stahl
he actually used to live here in Stockholm
and I met him on the very
I think it was the very first Svelte Stockholm meetup
that we hosted over here.
So that's a fun coincidence.
And now he's at the Spiegel doing data viz.
And I think he also came to the first in-person summit, no?
I don't remember.
Maybe.
Yeah, I don't know.
That was like so long ago.
And I was also very stressed out.
Didn't
he give a talk?
Yeah, I have a fear because, you know,
I remember saying to him that I was literally
having this really weird heated debate or watching heated debate and just joining in now and then to
like troll the people like to fan the flames a bit because i thought it was amusing on twitter
um but it was between dr matthew stall is that on twitter i don't know is it real doctor or not
and someone
else yeah
and and so basically i said to him at the time may have been the first summit
uh like by the way i'm just trolling you on twitter nice to meet you kind of thing
something
along those lines you know so
maybe it was the first summit where that when it happened
yeah i i don't remember i'm my my brain was totally fried there were a
couple of talks from
like newspaper organizations at the first summit and i just i was thinking that they were one of
them
no i so so i think that was bloomberg that was julian and
uh okay yeah yeah
britney
yeah um yeah i i i don't remember but yeah he's he's a it's a really nice guy um you should you
should never get
that name wrong again because i introduced her as like some other name for some
reason and
of course
i get my own name wrong
yeah it's not easy it's not easy doing hard work you
know it's a lot of names to keep in your head and
like oh it's read the correct
notes and
stuff
And make sure you're on the right line.
Yeah.
So I want to mention this early in the episode
because if people drop off,
but you're doing a meetup in Berlin, right?
Maybe we should talk a bit about that.
You just
announced it the
other day, I think.
Yeah.
But I'm going to fully disclaim
you pressured me into doing this at the
summit, basically.
Since then, it's been like a heavy rock on my shoulders
to kick it off.
I
think I shamed you a bit as well
on Discord,
like, oh,
you should stop tweeting so much and do the meetup.
Exactly, exactly, yeah.
All
in good fun.
I don't want to really pressure you.
I mean, in August,
this thing happened where,
for whatever reason, Paolo asked me
on Bluescape if I would like to join the ambassadors.
And I was like, I had
real imposter feelings because
all the core maintainers are there,
and I don't contribute
in terms of PRs or something like that to Svelte.
But then I was like, okay, one thing I can do
is actually spread the word
because every time I talk to people about Svelte,
like afterwards they tell me,
man, you really, it's like, it sounds convincing.
You are like hyped.
You love it.
Sounds good.
I'm going to try it.
And they try and then they start using it.
And then they was like, oh, it's awesome.
And like, yeah, so this is how I like also like,
actually once created my own colleague
because I told them to start learning it.
And then like a year later,
I was able to, you know, co-work with them.
So about the Svelte
meetup,
December 9th should
be a
Tuesday.
We will be hosted by Data Wrapper in Berlin
in their new office.
Nice.
And we will have three talks.
And it's not only me doing this.
It's also Peter from XYFlow.
So basically the person who ported
and implemented SvelteFlow,
this graph visualization, graph library.
We'll have three talks.
One will be Peter introducing SvelteFlow,
talking about in detail,
and also doing like a little side extra discussion
comparing Svelte to React
because they are maintaining two libraries,
one for React, which is the main one, XYFlow,
and the second one is SvelteFlow.
So obviously they have real-world benchmarks,
what it means to basically implement the same library
in two different frameworks.
That's awesome.
We are still in discussions about the second talk,
which might be big, but I can't reveal it.
And then depending on how much basically time
this person would need for their talk,
I will either jump in with the talk or not.
And I would talk about this community survey app
I built with SvelteKit, Superbase,
some BAN middleware, Paraglide, all this stuff.
So there will be three talks.
There will be pizza.
Registration is on the Svelte Guild, Guildhost.
Yeah, we'll have a
link.
in the in the network and on blue sky and we are like we have like i don't know like 25 seats maybe
and 20 or 21 already signed up so yeah get the
four four last seats might actually be full by
the time this goes out next next thursday so hopefully not but we'll see we'll see and yeah
but we have no idea right
exactly exactly but we
have no idea like
how many people are in berlin
And so this is like where we are like a bit cautious, you know, about like, do we get a full room or not?
And now like within, we just announced it yesterday.
There were already 21 people who basically signed up within 24 hours.
So let's see.
I think Svelte is popular.
Yeah.
I think especially in Germany and Berlin area, like there's quite a few companies and things that use it in that area.
So I think you'll get quite a few.
Yeah.
How is the Berlin tech scene, like other than Svelte?
Is it
a lot of meetups
or?
From what I hear from other people living in other places,
it might be a bit similar.
So before COVID, there were like,
you could go to a meetup every day somewhere.
There would be one on JavaScript, on TypeScript,
on map making, on whatever, on every topic.
And then with COVID, I think there was some like,
what is it, like it hit the dent or so a bit.
Now it's recovering.
And yes, there's like quite a big tech scene.
So, you know, we know Git Butler has an office in Berlin.
Data Wrapper is in Berlin.
All the media companies are there.
All the consultancies are there.
McKinsey, Accenture, whatever.
Plus we had like three or four different bootcamps.
And all the people from those bootcamps,
they basically joined all those, you know,
mobile first companies.
The one
for Lieferando, Amazon.
So there are like, I don't know, thousands of developers actually.
Yeah.
So it will take some time to convince every one of them,
each one of them to join and start using Svelte.
But yeah, I think
maybe...
One person at a time.
Right, exactly.
And then we'll take
over the work.
Use
a megaphone and go to the canteen and just shout.
I feel like, wouldn't it be a very Berlin-ish
to do like a Svelte Tech rave meetup or something like
that?
Yeah,
right, right.
I like that.
With some
techno,
obviously.
I'll
put my flights.
Oh, right.
You're an old rave person, right?
An old rave person.
Well, I mean,
I meant you used to go to raves and stuff.
I used to go to
raves.
I mean, I still would
if I didn't have two children after all time.
Yeah.
What's a
rave like?
I've never been to a rave.
What's a
rave like?
uh how do you describe it it's i don't know it's probably not for everyone the music's
loud music it's very
dark and often feels kind of cold in there till you get dancing a bit
and then
it's kind of like i don't know it's a
weird experience if you could explain it maybe
it wouldn't be as fun right so it's more that you can't really put you i can't put a pin on why it's
good it's just kind of good i mean it's basically like a nightclub vibe but different it is but
Like, yeah, I feel like a lot of nightclubs are cheesy
and kind of like, you know, the music's not as great.
And in a rave, you're kind of in that zone
and the music continues and stuff like that.
Yes, pretty good.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean,
you can
simulate it.
Like, you know, just code until 3 a.m.,
put on some music in the background and dim the lights.
Or
I don't know if you have like...
Yeah, I don't know about the raves you go to,
but the raves I go to don't feel like that.
I feel like you need
those Philips Hue lights
that blink in different colours maybe
and then you can have the music on
the strobe lights
right
smoke machine
is that what it's called?
smoke machine, lasers
you need the people
you need to be surrounded by people
just invite all
your friends
have them stand
around you
while you do coding
but I think
most people around you
they need to be
in varying states
of consciousness
in order to make it
feel
like a rave
as well
fair enough
it sounds
like
we should have a rave
at the next
World Summit
I think so
and I think
I already
know
who the DJ will be
right
who's the DJ
going to be
I can't DJ
by the way
not in my skill set
we'll invite
Brady
of course
the
guy
that made uh the svelte radio intro song that's true that's yeah he's not been to one of the
svelte summits yet
no so i
think yeah i think i hope he can come for the for the next one that'd
be fun
he can do some live like
live production like
you gotta have a break from touring
yeah yeah yeah um okay sorry so a bit of a tangent there
sorry listeners
but so so okay so what kind of stuff are you building now for ngos like give us some examples
and what what how is it different well i don't know how much you've worked with like regular
business clients and then ngos like what's the difference yeah
so oh there are so many differences
i feel it's like um it's a bit like like really was it like a stark contrast basically between
working for those two environments but then also i met some employers where they are like right in
they feel like they have a for-profit mission.
So they try to earn money,
but then they work like an NGO or administration
or something like this.
So I think
I've seen basically the three worlds.
I think one thing is that the first thing about NGOs
is mostly they don't have their own funding.
They usually depend on grants, on donations.
This is why they are not for profit.
They don't create any revenue, right?
And there are two things.
One thing is that they don't have a product to sell.
They have insights to sell or they are trying to advocate for something.
So then they are not trying to sell something.
They are basically trying to pursue people and learning about something or understanding it or trying to see it from a different point of view.
So work for them mostly is like story first.
So you need to figure out how to help them to tell a particular story.
It could be like a report or for a website.
basically you need to help them figure out like to present themselves so that like especially if
they have different audiences because usually like like one NGO I'm working with right now they have
two audiences one is their community because it's like it's the community basically of um
black BIPOC people in Germany and first of all it's like a huge community it's like one million
people that they estimate like Germany has
80 million people
and and and they they assume or
the estimate is that like one one million has like some some some BIPOC roots like African German or
or African-American.
That's one thing.
And one thing is obviously they try to create stuff
for their own community, for themselves,
but then they also need to attract funders.
So basically, you know, was it like white-collar people,
people
who are not
black,
and people who are maybe like super senior
in some federal administration or something like this.
And you need to figure out how to make a website work
for both of them, for both of those communities,
But, and this is the third thing, since they don't have their own budget, they usually have project budget.
Project budget means they have applied for funding maybe a year ago, maybe two years ago.
So whatever you are doing, like then when you are implementing all the preprocessing, all the preparations happened two years ago.
And you know what
happens like in the
tech world within two years, right?
And so they arrive and they're like, hey, we have like a budget of, I don't know, like 6,000 euros.
Can you get us a website and a dashboard?
And we need a newsletter and this and this and this and this and this.
So
obviously, this is why you have to use the most efficient technologies you can find.
And this is where Svelte comes in as one of the most efficient pieces of the puzzle.
This is, I
think, one of the biggest things that you need to understand first is that
it's not that we have a project budget, which we can adjust.
And the deadline basically has been set two years ago.
something like this usually that's one thing and the other thing is they are not used to doing
product so they don't have like a po or something like that if you're lucky there they have maybe
they have like a fixed was it um in their organization maybe they have a person full-time
responsible for communications if you are lucky
that means
that this person knows what the jpeg is
and that you can't upload five megabyte images but usually they don't and usually don't they
don't have their own IT department they like don't have a domain or something
like this so you need to set up everything for them and the other thing
is it's project based so that means that if you launch a website but funding is
done you get paid once
there is not no
such thing that they are going to pay
you for the next four years to maintain it so
first of all
you need to negotiate
it in advance but second you need to make sure that your website still runs or
can be deployed in four years
with tiny updates maybe right right so interesting so so you're
very budget constrained and you know you you have like a hard limit compared to like
if you're working for a client at a at a company doing like a marketing website or something
right
exactly but then on the other hand what i see in comparison to like for-profit companies
says usually the deadline is not really a hard deadline unless there is like a particular date
that they want to launch a report website because there will be some summit.
If this is not the
case,
there is no real deadline. And that means that even if the budget is smaller, what you then have
is time. And this is where basically how I, I think, grew into this full stack developer role
and why I had this opportunity to try out everything is basically, okay, look, your budget
is very limited but if you give me three months
of time for this and we do
like a weekly
iteration that means that
I can study some super base I can study
some SQL I can figure out how to
like what stack we could use
and then it becomes
a bit more like a you know like I don't know like a
paid
traineeship or
something like
this and then the day rate
can be like 500 or even
less
right if you're lucky
you
can get maybe like a 700
euro day rate or something like this
but you can figure out what to do
how to basically max out on time.
Yeah, interesting.
That's a very different style of working with clients.
I've only
ever worked with like paid,
like, well, not paid, but like
businesses,
right?
So it's very, very different.
So what kind of stuff have you noticed that are like,
so I assume since like the budget is constrained,
you kind of have to prioritize, right?
What do you often work with like minimizing the scope,
changing the scope of what the NGO wants?
Because you mentioned like, we want a
newsletter,
we
want blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But then like, there's only so much money
to implement stuff, right?
So what, in terms of like, yeah, where would you,
not cut corners, but like, what would you prioritize
in your experience?
That's
a tough question because it depends.
Right.
Now, lucky me is that I also did this
like one design thinking certificate
and then it helped me with some,
I mean, I know like design thinking,
it's very similar to human computer interaction
or something like this.
It's like, you know, this marketing buzzword
for a particular way of thinking about
what you're going to do.
What I'm trying to do as a principle is,
you know, there's this project triangle
product triangle was it feasibility desirability and the third pillar feasibility desirability
so does it make sense can we afford it and what do we actually want and
what i'm trying
to do with
them is to ignore feasibility because we will find ways to to make it feasible so to implement it
and focus on desirability and then they have many many ideas huge wish list second thing is that we
do is we prioritize which is like essential for the launch for product launch which is essential
to achieve a particular goal and everything else is basically on top if we have time or if there's
something that i want to basically learn in my free time then then we're gonna bake it in um but
otherwise we are trying to focus on the core and this is also like one thing that you need to to
teach them or to figure out with them is that for themselves they need to figure out what the unique
selling point
of something
is or what the core is.
And they probably don't know.
Right, exactly.
And because I think in nine out of 10 cases,
it's academics.
It's people with a political science degree
or public policy degree or something like this.
They have so much knowledge in their brain,
but no one ever taught them at uni
or during their PhD or whatever,
how to tell a story,
how to focus on the essential parts.
And basically, how to tell them
how to turn a page into a single paragraph.
Right.
this is actually where the most most of the work is figuring out the story and then you realize
okay maybe we don't need this feature it doesn't make sense and if you like also all those techniques
like how might we or why why why you know the why why why method like ask someone why they want
something three
times
like why right and then it will be most like nine out of ten times it will
eliminate itself and
the feature
will disappear
yeah it's a difference between it between like a
highly technical person or a discipline of being highly technical versus being uh you know product
orientated and i think that there's there's a huge void there that the people that you want on your
team are not necessarily the most clever or technically adept people are the people the
biggest product focus when you're a small company or when you're a small team so
maybe there's a
there's a comparison to draw there like between very very small companies
and ngos
like because
there's only so much knowledge
that you can have inside of a small company, right?
I mean, sure, there are like geniuses
in small companies that know everything, of course,
but I assume that's the case in NGOs as well.
One thing I notice is I think in companies,
for whatever reason, even in small ones,
there's still some type of like a division of labor
or hierarchy.
And
they have like at least an implicit understanding
of who decides and who maybe can veto something
and
who is basically
just there
so that their advisory can be heard,
but it's not a blocker.
In NGOs, maybe because of this community spirit
or something like this, it's usually very flat.
So there are many people who can veto something
and there are also many people who
can voice ideas,
right?
And yeah, this is the hardest part basically
because sometimes it's like contrarian opinions
or contrarian wishes.
And this is not, you can do the regression to the mean,
then you will have like a mediocre product
or you need to kind of do some Game of Thrones thing
behind the scenes, like a
particular,
yeah, yeah, it's lots, it's still,
it's lots of politics at those companies.
And it's personal because this is also one thing
at NGOs, people very often are very like personally invested
in a particular topic.
Yeah, they care a lot.
Right, they care a lot because it's either they are impacted
or it's someone whom they know who is impacted
by some social policy or so everything is quite personal like
lots of this
stuff this is why also
they like very often burn out
because there is
no separation between work and and free time
right so yeah there are like many very special
things
but i think
it prepares me for the for
profit market
if you're if you're very invested in something as well but you but the company
structure means that you can't change it that's also quite tiring and it can burn you out very
quickly right so you know you if you're given and i guess in my world i would call that that being
invested in something ownership um if you're given ownership of something or you believe you have
ownership of something you should be able to change it at your will without having to go through lots
of red tape which is probably what i call the other bit i know flat structures generally i i prefer
flat structures and they work but i've never really tried a true flat structure at scale
and i think that if you try to this is what this is what i i interviewed with meta i mean that was
you know i was young and i needed the money and i didn't i was just i just did but one of the
things they told me was that basically the whole company is flat and and if there's any problems
you just you go straight to zuckerberg and i said sure that sounds
that sounds like what happens
there that sounds that sounds realistic i believe you
and it's that kind of thing
is like um you know
you could you could it's you were laughing right because there's no way that works right that
doesn't work right it's just nonsense so i think i think that yeah ownership
is
why i like to work
small companies because you can get ownership you can move things you know you may even still be a
cog in a wheel feel like a cog in a wheel but as long as that cog can turn whereas if you're not
it will turn that cognitive
yeah i there is a counter like example of of like a company
large company that is i mean not as large as meta but valve right they're they're supposedly a very
flat uh company and that but they also kind of like we work on whatever we want to work on which
is very nice that's
kind of nice that's kind of nice and and you know if i believe that kind of
company works and i'm gonna get shot down in flames this but that's that's apparently how i
understand that palantir works as well right is that you kind of work on where you think your
efforts could be best put and the way that the reason that works is because the people they hire
are the kind of people who can do that it wouldn't work in every company where you know people are
hired uh let's say with a lesser bar like a lower bar to get it to entry because those people wouldn't
be able to correctly prioritize and be able to correctly figure out what is and isn't important
it's a certain caliber of person and i think that maybe valve has those people right and that's and
that's great i love i love that right you know complete autonomy and if you've got complete
autonomy like that and the people are right then you can have a flat structure but yeah i don't
think anyone believes it can happen at scale the scale of meta even though i'm sure meta has a high
as well but still it's just so there's so many people
right yeah someone has to to like make a
decision somewhere right yeah and
it's not always stuck
right and
the thing is you can also slice
a company up to provide more autonomy i worked in sky which is a huge company our team had autonomy
but our team was like 16 people there were other teams that had absolutely zero autonomy and it's
just because the way things are sliced and dice and i think if you if you can slice and dice it
even within a large organization where you have full control and we had to break down some barriers
like they had a provisioning computer provisioning thing i joined the company as a contractor getting
paid a load of money and it was going to take four weeks for them to get a computer through this
provisioning service and it was going to be just a regular pc that would cost like 800 quid at the
shop and it was five grand because it's being provisioned via british telecom or some crap like
that and they just went they went to pc world and they expensed the computer for me and they bought
the computer and put it on my desk within the same day right and it's that kind of thing that if you
can do that it wasn't really allowed but if you can do that they can work in a big company you can
have the autonomy and the ownership and you can control things yourself yeah like there were teams
just wouldn't do that and be like well you just sit there for four weeks getting paid do nothing
whilst we provision a
really expensive
computer for you
sounds very boring
as well very very boring
very slow nothing changes you get disrupted easily that kind of thing so that's why sky were doing
this thing where they where they would have this autonomy in certain teams to try and change things
and it you know it works it works it definitely works
yeah so ilia we met we mentioned kind of
struggles of working with an NGO?
Well, some of the hard stuff with working with NGOs.
What are some of the good things that you've
experienced working with these?
I think it was super helpful to hear Anthony explaining his
past employers. Because that's the upside.
If you work for NGOs, you are usually the only person.
and you are the only technical person.
And also like the way I worked is like,
I also did this product vision design creative thing.
So basically also, you know,
like leading the story or trying to come up with a narrative.
First of all, you can be fully creative.
If you are a creative person,
there's basically no limit what you can contribute to them.
And obviously as a tech person,
you can preserve your sanity because you can choose your own stack.
You know, there's, you are not inheriting some,
some React code base from 2019.
You are writing from scratch
mostly,
right?
You will start from scratch,
but there is no tailwind.
You just write the stuff
the way you imagine it should be written.
And I think this is like also,
especially now with Svelte,
with the rapid development of Svelte,
that means that you can try out
the cutting edge stuff.
You can try
out Svelte
5 server-side rendering
with Bun or like
the thing that
I tried out
is Svelte in Astro server islands
for pre-rendering Astro content and it works.
And I can just present it to them.
And then look, we have something,
no one has done it before, but it works and it's awesome.
And we can make your landing page
display for 15 events dynamically from a DB
and you don't need to redeploy on every event
every time you
edit an event.
So this freedom gives, like, I don't know,
it gives me a lot of joy.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can imagine, like, being able to just
also experimenting, right?
With new features and things that you might not be able to do.
And if you're stuck on Svelte 4, for example,
which some companies are, right?
I think
Brittany, you
mentioned like a while back
that you guys were stuck on Svelte 4
and
just upgraded to
Svelte 5 or something?
My previous company,
we were stuck on
Svelte 3 on the main app.
And then, yeah, they couldn't even upgrade it to Svelte 4.
And then we started working on a separate project in Svelte 4 right before Svelte 5 came out.
And that one, from what I've heard from people that still work there, is still not
migrated.
They still haven't worked on this React project they were going to switch to.
But, yeah, the new company I work for, they have like an old plugin that uses Svelte 4.
And I'm migrating it to Svelte 5, but in a completely new repo.
we didn't
go
through the migration just working on it
completely fresh so there's like that that
that's usually what happens in in a company you're you're stuck on an
old version of something
yeah
like anthony and zapper well have you have you do you have
news and we're still doing it we
are we
now have
a dedicated resource basically and it's peru right who's who's
migrating this page
by page
yeah he's getting there there's a
lot to go
but he's getting there
that's good
Sapper is like ancient at this time
at this point right
yeah well yeah
I bet it still runs
though
it still runs
it still boots really slowly
still you start the app up and it takes like
20 seconds to
start maybe more
was it Finn McCann that like had a bunch of stuff
on Sapper for a long time
I don't know
possibly
who
does ElderJS
Oh, that's Nick.
Nick.
Yeah.
But
wasn't ElderJS?
No, that's ElderJS
is like his own thing.
So he
built another framework.
I swear somebody was on Sapper for like a really long time and had,
I don't remember,
a bunch
of sites like just still running it.
I mean, if it works, it works.
Oh, yeah.
And
it does work in production.
It works, right?
I think Decathlon had their whole site written in Sapper.
I think they were using Svelte.
I'm not 100% sure they were just using Svelte and something else.
But they rebuilt their site, which was really creaking.
And it was amazing in Svelte.
And then they recently rebranded and built it again in something else.
And it's shit.
It's just terrible.
Like, I love the cafe.
I think they're brilliant.
But I don't know why they decided to move away from Svelte.
But their new site, it just sucks.
It looks like Shopify, like it's that bad.
Maybe it is Shopify.
Yeah.
I mean, again, I
don't think Shopify is necessarily bad.
but I think it has a certain format if you don't configure it.
And I think it looks like that.
It's just very, very basic.
Yeah, it's probably, which in itself is, right.
We're getting down a
tangent here.
But my
point being that it looks like a basic
and configured Shopify instance, and it operates like one.
And you used to be able to really dig into the search a lot
and find things you wanted.
Now you can't.
Yeah, yeah.
You just can't.
This discussion kind of brings up another thought.
So working with these NGOs, I assume you don't have to really worry that much about like, oh, in the future, we need to upgrade to Svelte 6 because they're probably just going to stick to the website that you build.
Or like, how does that?
Like, of course, you want to build something that you can maintain, right?
Yeah.
Since it's project based,
it must be different.
both questions are very good especially britney's because the oldest website i built was like in
2020 or something like this like a whole website which i built and i don't need to redeploy it
the only thing that breaks is if safari releases a new version of the browser then something always
breaks for whatever reason um like one website i built i think in 2021 the academic freedom index
um their pair contract i need to do daily updates because every year there's a new index
and I went actually the whole story with it so far.
It's like it's Astro,
but then from Svelte 3 to Svelte 4,
from Svelte 4 to Svelte 5.
And I think like that there will be no big changes
between Svelte 5 and 6
because the focus is now on SvelteKit,
which brings me to like the most up-to-date topic.
Right now I'm helping an NGO
basically relaunch their website.
And this NGO has existed for almost 10 years.
They have like 500 sub pages and content collections
in directors.
It's like events, projects, people, pages, all the stuff,
like 12 different content collections.
And because, first of all, it's a mostly volunteer-run organization,
so they, again, also don't have permanent stuff.
Right now they have a tech person,
and this tech person is the only person who knows their way around in directors.
And we're going to leave it as it is for now
because we're focusing on the website relaunch.
but right now we are migrating away from SvelteKit 1 to Astro
just for the sake of the stability for the next year or so.
Like I think in, I don't know, like when SvelteKit 3 is out,
I think if it would have been out, I would have made the decision differently.
But right now, especially because I want to basically make sure
that they can operate next year on their own
and do
tiny updates,
I'm migrating them to Astro.
I think what I like about both SvelteKit and Astro is the way how pages are structured, how slacks work, file-based routing, it's actually very easy then to translate back and forth
as long as your
content collection is somewhat stable or in an organized state.
So there is no big loss for them right now.
And those pages are mostly either fully static or they just need a tiny dynamic part.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, right.
Astro works and SvelteKit works as well.
Those websites where you need server-side rendering
or something dynamic,
obviously those are a bigger concern.
And yeah, I need to make up my mind yet
because this year I built this whole ecosystem
for a community survey app.
It's like everything.
It's like the Superbase with database.
Everything is self-hosted also for privacy reasons.
And I'm operating the server
and I will continue doing so next year.
again there's this opportunity as soon as all the breaking changes arrive in SvelteKit
I can test it out for myself and I can use this production app basically obviously on a
development branch right to test all of it to figure out what works what doesn't and if there
is something broken you know I can open an issue or talk to the maintainers or something like this
and this is I think also like something where I can I can just create my own time you know take
my own time to do this because i can kind of you know control the timeline when things have to
happen and i'm not sure how this works in the company unless you are very very senior and
you know your your pm or whoever is
like
trusting you a lot
i mean in in a company you you always
have to it's all about profit in the end right like it's
something costs
money you have to earn
money so there's some priority of like and even like an upgrade
has to have like some cost value
to them to be able to get it done yeah and with the work that you're doing with the ngos like
yeah it's like you have this free playground but you also have consumers of the app you have to
think of and like you said you're putting them on astro for stability so that they have access to
the things that they need when you're not there anymore
yeah um so any other thoughts and questions
and stuff about NGOs.
I've run all out of my questions.
I can add one because you asked about the upsides
of working with NGOs.
And there's like this obvious thing is like you are helping
usually good people do good things.
And
if you help them, sometimes they have a very particular idea.
Like once we built a website for a basically meetup
with parliamentarians because they wanted to impact legislation
with regards to Telegram.
So we had like a hard deadline and then we launched the website exactly for this event, like in particular for this event.
And so they succeeded.
This legislation then followed or
it happened.
Oh, nice.
Right.
Or sometimes you enable them to do, you know, like even just a simple, this is your own self-hosted newsletter or management thing.
And they're like so happy because, you know, they promise to their community that this is like privacy first and nothing, you know, is collected by other companies.
And then they can follow up and basically deliver on this promise.
Yeah.
And they don't have to pay thousands of dollars for an email marketing solution.
Especially
like this big project, which is called the AfroZensus, which was like a large
end survey of this German African community.
This product, we relaunched it.
It's still online.
It's been online for three or four years.
And this is like also a dashboard for the community itself, because all those people, many of them
have suffered discrimination
or they have been,
you know, I don't know,
like been discriminated
by the police
on the housing market
and whatever.
And this data set
that the motivation
for this dashboard
was actually to revalidate
the people,
the people's experiences,
you know?
So we are not selling something.
We are basically
just helping people
to understand
that what they are like,
what is it?
Living through
is not unique to them
and it's actually a thing.
So there is
discrimination
in society
and they are validated.
and just this
I think actually it uplifted the whole
community you know and
then they
basically think about bigger plans
and bigger ideas and they have this thing
that they can use for advocacy
they can go to politicians show them the
website and the dashboard and I was like
no we are talking about thousands of
cases of discrimination just
by police forces or something like this
right yeah so it's very rewarding
actually
yeah that does sound very fun
well I mean not the
issues themselves, but rewarding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
So I think we, unless anyone has another question,
then we move on to the controversial parts of the
episode.
Oh, no.
So unpopular opinions.
Do you guys have one?
Who wants to go first?
Anthony?
About self-hosting.
It's going to be a health leader.
I have a bond,
yes.
Let's hear it.
It's not that controversial.
It's just something that was relevant to me today,
so I was thinking about it and made people disagree.
I'm sure people can argue over it because they argue over everything, right?
My controversial opinion is that people should store states, not effects.
And by this, I mean something like if you're dependent,
if you're wondering about the state of something being approved,
the effects of something being approved is that it gets published or promoted or featured, whatever.
There was a lot of discussion with my team today about what it should be called,
whether it should be called published or published at the date of when it's published,
or the designer wants to call it featured because she's going to use featured stuff on the front end.
Promotion, because it might relate to promoting things at some point.
And all this kind of backshedding about what the name should be,
it occurred to me that the actual thing here is a state of something being
approved or not approved is what we should be storing because everything else
is kind of like things that you can do with that thing because it is approved.
It's just the effects of it being approved rather than the actual state of the
object.
So we store approved in database or approval and then we store who approved it
and then we store a date and everything else is kind of like hanging off that.
So
store states,
not effects.
interesting i
thought you were gonna talk about uh effect.ts like no
no no type script library
as part of our huge migration to salt 5 we are um i'm now learning about effect and everything else
and it's all interesting stuff
all right does anyone else have a have a
and unpopular opinions
Brittany no
I am
trying to think
I'm
in a pretty good mood
today
nice
yeah I mean I
I have my standing unpopular
opinion about more people
should self host
by the way
do away with all the CDNs
yeah
so you don't go down when Cloudflare goes down
have you seen those memes online
so you've seen that
XKCD comic thing right
where it's like
boxes and stuff are stacked on top of each other
and then there's like this small
small box at the bottom
right
there's been a bunch
of those memes now
lately
I mean it was like GitHub was down
and like you couldn't code yesterday
with any like
GitHub was down as
well
yeah there's a lot of stuff down should i self-host git is this by
the way i'm
hearing from this yeah
oh that would be i mean it's not that bad there's
like lots of solutions for it but
you already self-host git right that's literally what git is
sure but but you know what i mean right you would have to
share it if you wanted to work with anyone
but yeah yeah but you
can share it you just get into remote into your machine and pull from your
your git yeah that
seems safe
you are but you but you're self-hosting by the way but you are
um you are the the server right and and
git habit is
just another server
and you're
just syncing them when you when you pull right let me let me clarify let me clarify
should i self-host a git repository gui and hosting solution for my git repositories
that I
can reach online
from
other...
That sounds like another side project
that'll take you five years.
What?
No, there's like
lots of them,
like
GitLab,
Gidea.
I used to use one.
I used to self-host,
by the way,
on DreamHost when I was on DreamHost
and I had all the Git repositories on DreamHost
and I was using one there
and I had some kind of UI
and I couldn't remember what it was.
It wasn't very good.
It wasn't anything like GitHub.
I was very excited to not self-host,
by the way, onto GitHub.
Yeah.
Which is free, by the way.
GitHub is free.
Until we run into limits.
Well, yes,
but I've
run the whole of Biancon GitHub free
for literally until like three months ago.
I mean, I don't think the limits are that harsh.
Those
free credits, man.
Do you have like popular opinion?
I don't know.
Like, did anyone have access to Copilot
and it just got taken away?
I do have access to Copilot.
I've not checked because Copilot,
I don't find it that useful.
so i i don't either as like an ai tool but for like when you're typing something it would auto
generate it and typically know what i was typing so it was much
faster you
just hit tab i have lost
that now and i feel like my
productivity has gone down like so i've had
free access for
three years or however long
it's why i
don't know like i was a member of an organization
that got free membership.
I would get a monthly email from them saying,
your membership has been renewed.
And then last month, just all of a sudden stripped it away.
I
don't know what organization it was.
It never like had any of that in the email.
Yeah.
So I don't know, like, what do I need to do to get this back?
I don't want
to pay $100 in a month.
You need to pay for it.
I don't know that it's worth that,
but like I missed that easy productivity.
Like I have the, I use the at component syntax in a lot of my components at the bottom that
has like the component documentation.
And
it's basically
marked down in a comment in Svelte.
I need to, I need to, a lot of that would just auto generate for me.
And so like things like that, it's so helpful for.
Yeah.
That's kind of, it's like one of those hidden features that I always forget about.
Like the documenting the
components.
Oh yeah.
It's so clutch for a design system.
I'm going to put it in the show notes.
It works
so well with our IntelliSense.
You hover over the component when you use it
and you can see all the properties that it has.
I have this nice table format I use
and it'll show you basically like a storybook thing
that's not interactive, obviously,
but you can
see everything that
you need.
Yeah, yeah.
It's nice.
Taching feature.
That'll
be my pick.
I'm sure I've picked that before, but I'll put that.
It's worth picking again.
add components, yeah.
So Ilya, do you have an unpopular opinion?
Yeah, I'm not sure if I should say it out loud or not.
So I like types and I like IntelliSense and all this stuff,
but I think I'm with Rich and I'm not sure
if it's most of the core maintainers,
but basically I prefer JSDoc over TypeScript
for many, many, many reasons.
And the main reason is because JSDoc helps me
to keep the code readable.
so I don't need to think about types
when I'm reading the code
I'm reading
the code
when I'm reading the code
and I think that the way how TypeScript works
is not the best solution
for providing types or defining types
so I'm a big JS docs fan
I actually agree with that
but I hate writing JS docs
so I like
writing TypeScript better
see this is why
we are paying for Copilot
because it then infers all the stuff
or rather Cursor
I'm using Chorazone.
Yeah.
All right.
Picks?
Brittany?
I have one of those too.
Brittany?
Brittany can go
first.
Mine's already done.
Yeah.
Add component documentation.
I
don't have to talk about it again.
All right.
Anthony?
Yeah.
So my pick this week,
Shock, Horror, and Surprise is a technical pick.
My pick is Friendly Capture.
And the reason it's Friendly Capture
is because it is GDPR compliant,
European That's
an oxymoron.
Based.
How do
you mean?
A friendly
CAPTCHA is an oxymoron.
Well,
no, it's not. Because one
of the things that I like about it, which I
didn't, it's not why I chose it, but I
like about it, is it's self-solving. So if
you go to the site and you see the CAPTCHA, it will,
whilst you're filling in the signup form,
whatever it will it will solve by doing cryptographic puzzles in your browser and it
will
doesn't that defeat the purpose of the captcha no
because i am not i am not a bot so
if you were a
bot if if you were a bot it would not self-solve right this is this is how it works it's the same
way as recapture will just not appear if uh if it detects you're not high risk this does something
a little bit different maybe you know arguably i don't know how it works exactly but a little bit
in that it will self-solve in your browser
because it will know that you're not a bot
and you're a low risk,
but it's just eradicating any remaining risk, right?
If you were using some automation or something like that,
I imagine it wouldn't solve.
Yeah.
I need something like
that.
I
know I've talked about
the Pokemon stuff before,
but like the recapture is getting insane on Pokemon Center
and you have to like,
the latest one has been like a bird house
and you have to pick which animal will go in this thing in the picture and it's a birdhouse so you
have to pick the birds but you have to do it over like three times
right so you have to pick four
birds
three times in a row to get through this recapture
it's getting crazy like the
you
need a
phd at some point to do captures yeah i've i've just got a new pick
as well so i just because my
wife just messaged me she says that because we're trying to book holiday we're trying to book a
first holiday and like it's literally been like five years since i've been a real holiday um and
she's found one she's the place we want to go they have a they have a plan you can go there like an
all-inclusive thing and it comes with a 24-hour butler
oh yeah that sounds horrible it sounds
amazing that sounds amazing you just call them up and
yeah and they they deliver i think tattinger
champagne to your room every day i mean it just sounds very expensive i
don't remember mcl mc it's
like a cruise line um
mcl they
um we were supposed to go to rome italy and leave off and
do a mediterranean cruise right
when covid hit
and it got canceled but it was gonna have a private
concierge 24
hours in
the room and i'm
like do you do you actually end up using those like whenever
i'm at a hotel
i've never had the opportunity to but i probably would
right i've
caught i've
called room service before
i mean
it's like similar but more personal
i
will definitely
use the bottle of champagne
every day i
mean because because you can say to the butler
we're going to go to the beach take our towels on the beach for us yeah
like so nice
yeah we'll
see you there the amount
of your own towels i want on
my vacation
no but why i don't want to bring
my house
I have children to carry
take my children
take my children to the beach
so your second pick is 24-7
Butler
well my second pick is
this holiday,
it sounds great
where is that?
it's in the Maldives
it's a
little out of
the Maldives
it'd be beautiful, well
when we book it
it will be, it's still not booked it
we're still there's still a millionaring but we book it for hopefully next month
i'm sure that's
very similar to hawaii that's what we're going to january yeah
well hawaii was on our list but we
i mean we love the maldives so i'm excited to go again especially be the first time the kids have
been to like well first time they've been a holiday which is shocking really but um definitely first
time maldives so i think they'll like it we get we're not gonna have a water bill this time because
the thought of having kids in a water villa treading out into the sea is not
amazing so
kids are a little young for that yeah
yeah this all just
sounds very
expensive we're gonna go
kayaking
and snorkeling and all the things exactly a lot of fun paddling
we like to flip it on its head kev we don't go it's very expensive might be fun we say it's fun
but it'll be expensive right because
you know okay
i i think there's no better way to spend
money than on travel i
100 agree yeah
so i i think i would agree as well
the cost worth the cost but
where i disagree is like i would much rather do a long vacation
yeah that
that is cheaper per day than a short one that is more expensive
but it's not that short
still be two weeks but
you could just a good amount of time you could do two months
with two months we can't really take two children away from their school and everything for two
months it's
not really not
practical i
i have fantasized about just letting them do like virtual
school or homeschool or something and just going anywhere i would do a six-month cruise around the
world i would i would just travel
like those uh like those pensioners that are like uh
like the seniors that are like
yeah it would be a bunch of senior citizens and me but yeah
sounds great although yeah i i don't know how you wouldn't get bored on a cruise ship though
like for six months you got yeah you gotta
go yeah i guess i
mean
oh i see so you would take
like one of those travel around the world cruise ships not
yeah where it stops at a bunch of
different okay yeah you
wouldn't go back and forth between miami and the caribbean
no
absolutely not
what so
how long does this stay in a
port for um
like a day or two like a normal
cruise you only stay for like six to ten hours depending on the
port sure that
is very short
but some of these longer cruises like this that we're talking about they do stay overnight sometimes
and
they'll still it's still short you're still spending six months on a ship with with a couple
the days here but
it's like
yes it feels like it's quite weighted it's not enough
to like experience
everything about the place that you're going but you get a little bit of the culture and then you
kind of
figure out where
do i want to go back to and spend more
time that's true it's like a tasting
flight yes
it's a flight of places
jesus
this was one of the longest tangents we've ever been on i
This is definitely a tangent of a tangent.
We can talk about a charity as well.
Welcome
to Svelte Radio with y'all.
Don't worry, we will chat.
We'll chat, Kev, about your long, cheap holidays really soon.
Have I been shamed for
preferring cheaper holidays that
go on for longer?
I have been on many cheap holidays, and I mean cheap holidays as in self-hosting, by the way.
No, self-accommodating in
hostels and
stuff like that,
by the way.
You know why I can go on holiday all the time?
it's because i'm self-hosting by the way self-hosting by the way
exactly not paying for
sell sixteen
thousand dollars a year yeah
or sorry
no no uh did you oh by the way did you uh
uh solve the the google big data big query thing that you were talking about the
other day well
first of all we put a bunch of slots in place we've got a slot reservation so we've reduced our
bills by by controlling them a bit but i'm gonna move the whole lot i think to postgres because i
don't think we use BigQuery for
what it's designed for.
Yeah, so I will do whenever I get 10 seconds.
I will actually go back to working on that,
which is my primary thing right now.
Yeah, no, totally get it.
All right, Ilya, do you have a pick?
How many picks do I get?
You can have as many as you want,
but we will be here for hours if you have 10,000 of them.
I mean, I probably have 10,000.
So for all Svelte developers, all Svelte developers
need to use Svelte Render Scan from Stanislav
and Svelte Inspect Value from iRig.
Those are the
two most
useful libraries that exist in Svelte ecosystem.
Svelte Inspect.
Svelte Inspect Value, right.
This is the one which gives you this pane where you just plug all your state into it
and it renders it reactively.
And if it's an object, it will render the whole object.
You never have to add another code position fix details thing.
Are they packages like you install in your library?
Yeah, right.
The packages, you install them,
and then you just mount them as a regular component.
And Render Scan will render everything.
Basically, if you wrap your whatever section or component
in Svelte Render Scan,
it will render everything that happens within it.
It highlights every re-render.
Oh, nice. Okay.
It's brilliant.
That's brilliant, especially for,
you know, effect and stuff like this.
Yeah.
So those were my, like, two Svelte-related ones.
The third one is Sarah Swaydan, you know, the accessibility expert.
Her course, Practical Accessibility, is on discount right now.
And this only happens, like, once a year or so.
And it's a hefty discount of, like, 30%.
So I think everyone should go and buy it.
Yeah.
That's my three picks for this week.
All right.
Cool, cool.
All right.
so I have two picks
so one is
you can just do things
and I did just that this week
because I've long
been talking about like having a
a SvelteKit adapter
that renders to
a
service worker
and I've always
been intimidated by the adapter
thing like how do you even build
one and stuff but
using the power of LLMs,
I managed to actually create one,
which was very nice.
So I did some experimentation
and I built an adapter
that basically takes your whole SvelteKit application
and puts it inside of this service worker.
So you have server endpoints,
you have form actions,
and all of that good stuff.
Which LLM did you use?
So I used Claude Code.
Yeah, yeah.
I could have guessed.
Yeah, that's my go-to.
It's just very nice.
It is very nice.
So I'm going to pick that.
And then you reminded me of another one of Stanislav's projects.
And it's like a showcase of how to build a progressive web app
that kind of feels native.
And so I met him yesterday here in Stockholm.
We had like a Svelte lunch that we usually do once a month.
They would just go
somewhere and eat
lunch, a bunch of Svelte people.
And so he told us about this thing called Sparkle Post,
which is like a Twitter clone that he made.
And it's just like this very nice experience that you can install on your phone as like a PWA.
And it feels native, which is nice.
Then I have one last pick.
Sorry.
this was my original pick so i have started reading a series called the hierarchy which
is like a fantasy book series by james islington it's very nice uh he just released the second
book in a trilogy and i can really recommend it if you if you're into fantasy so yeah that might
be my next book yeah
it's
right it's very good it's very good so kevin if i understand
you
correctly, that means that you will turn the Svelte
Playground in a progressive web app?
Well, that was kind of one of the reasons why I wanted to try it
or that I picked this thing up again.
Because
I kind
of want to be able to do SvelteKit
like the Playground, right?
The same kind of experience of not having to install web containers
and all this crap that you have to install.
It takes forever and it breaks half the time
depending on the browser that you're using and stuff.
But there's like this one big thing is that you...
It's hard to tie together like updating the files
to actually building it and deploying it
because you have to actually build it to get it to adapt, right?
So you can't do it in like a dev environment, if that makes sense.
or at least I don't know how to uh maybe maybe some magician uh that knows V really really well
can can figure that out I don't know but yeah so those are my three picks a lot of picks this week
right that's crazy all right uh thank you Ilja for joining us uh it was a lot of fun I I had no idea
about all this NGO stuff.
And it's
kind of opened another world
as to how, like there's this other thing
where you produce stuff for NGOs
that's very different to how you would build
for other people.
And of course I
made myself the floating head.
Sorry?
I made
myself the floating head.
Interesting.
I think we're losing it.
My
stomach
is
growling.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
We will talk to you next week.
Bye.