Transitioning from React to SvelteKit

In this episode of Syntax, Scott talks with Wes about moving Level Up Tutorials from React to SvelteKit — why he did it, how, benefits, things to watch out for, and more!

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Show Notes

07:28 - Thoughts

• Apples to oranges, so unfortunately, no super legit ability to compare.
  • SvelteKit isn’t analogous with a custom React setup that uses CSR
    • SSR is usually going to be faster - we can ship less JS
    • Some big things changed beyond React → SvelteKit
      • Apollo → GFetch
      • Plyr → Vime
    • HLS starts grabbing chunks immediately, so it’s hard to get accurate load time and transfer.
• Whole conversion took a couple of months.
• Hardest part was making UI choices and changes, straight up converting components one by one wasn’t actually that tough

16:14 - Converting React components to Svelte

• useState becomes just a straight-up variable
• Graphql calls were hooks now just imported generated functions
• Remove extranous fragments
• Convert {things && } to {#if thing}{/if}
•  becomes 

24:06 - Spark joys

• State
  • Our checkout flow became way more transparent, way easier with Svelte stores
• Render flow
  • Was never something we needed to really think about. Didn’t think about memoizing, or worrying about too many renders down the line, just never needed to
• Overall developer experience
  • It’s honestly a joy to work in and I don’t want to go back
• Making a library
  • Package dir, new SvelteKit project, svelte-kit package
  • I made svelte-toy - https://github.com/leveluptuts/svelte-toy
  • svelte-element-query - https://github.com/leveluptuts/Svelte-Element-Query
  • svelte-simple-datatable fork
• Creating a sitemap was extremely easy, because of server-side routes. file.returnformat.ts ie sitemap.xml.ts
• CSS without a css-in-js library for scoping is a dream. CSS props are now 100% via CSS variables using the https://svelte.dev/docs#style_props
• Animations are all done with Svelte’s internal animations lib

32:45 - Hosting

• adapter-node
• Hosted on render.com as a straight-up node process $7/m for more than enough RAM and CPU,
• Lots of other options for static, Vercel, workers whatever, I like having just a straight-up node app you can host anywhere

35:50 - Things to do

• Admin tools
  • Pancake lib for charts

37:00 - Challenges

• ESM is not always smooth sailin
  • Import has from ‘lodash/has’ didn’t working in dev, but import has from ‘lodash/has.js’ didn’t work in prod.
    • Solution was to use lodash.has as the dependency
    • Apollo included all React as a dep unless you import from @core
• TS is great, but there was once where I wanted to define the entire props ts object for a spread prop, but was not possible
• Drag animations

Cloudinary

42:46 - Wes’ questions

• What about the ecosystem?
• What about forms + DOM data?
• Serverless functions?
• Do you always bind to state? Or just access directly?

formData = writable({ title: "yo" }) {$formData.title}

• Is it stable?
• Deno - Snel

Links

• https://leveluptutorials.com/
• https://vitejs.dev/

××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ×××

• Scott: The Skeptics Guide To The Universe Podcast
• Wes: Pressure Washer Nozzle

Shameless Plugs

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• Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax’ for $10 off!

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