20 December 2022

Issue 003: Svelte is now ready for production

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Digest Issue 003
In this issue SSR with SvelteKit _ Vite 4 is out _ Writing presentations in Markdown _ What do you do with flaky tests?
Rico Sta. Cruz @rstacruz

This month, I’ve been looking into meta-frameworks like Astro and SvelteKit. Check out what I’ve learned recently. I send out emails like these regularly, be sure to subscribe below! 👇

Svelte is now ready for production

I tried Svelte 1.0 many years ago, and found that it lacked a few things that I consider needed for a production-grade library: support for types, developer tooling, a thriving community, and a SSR framework. Svelte now has all of those. SvelteKit lets you build server-rendered Svelte apps, going toe-to-toe with the likes of Next, Remix, Nuxt, and more.

Read more... ●●●

Fireship on YouTube recently posted a 4-minute overview video. With SvelteKit, I feel like the concept of file-system based routing is further cemented as the new standard practice, and takes it further with a style similar to Next 13’s app directory convention.

A new generation of bundlers

I’ve always considered Vite to be the evolution of the JavaScript bundling tech that Browserify and Webpack started long ago. Bundlers are still vital, but it’s role has changed today. Vite simplifies this all by uniting the bundleless approach, building with Rollup, and now compiling with tools like SWC under one unified package and API.

Write slide decks with Markdown

Markdown-based slideshow tools are not new. I’ve relied a lot on Marp (I even have a Marp theme I use a lot), and there’s also mdx-deck and reveal.

Slidev has blown me away with all the features it has. It can record presentations with webcam video! It has drawing tools! Styling can be done with Tailwind-like CSS!

Dual track development

When building software, “discovery” and “development” can be two separate tracks of work. I’ve found that some teams tend to line up their work with research and discovery planned along with development work in a linear fashion. They don’t have to. These two things can be done in parallel.

Flaky end-to-end tests

Interesting article from 2021 from the Netflix engineering team on how they deal with flaky tests.

Thanks for reading! I'm Rico Sta Cruz, I write about web development and more. Subscribe to my newsletter!