Luke Edwards: The man with many libraries

Dec 27, 2020

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This time we're joined by Svelte core maintainer Luke Edwards, known for his many NPM packages. We talk Cloudflare Workers, his jest alternative uvu and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Guest: Luke Edwards. Twitter. Github
Hosts: Kevin, Shawn, Antony

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Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 0:00
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Svelte radio. Today we have another guest on the show. But first introductions. I'm Kevin, and I run a site called Svelte school where I teach people about Svelte. And yeah, that's me.

Shawn 0:15
I'm Shawn. I work as a developer advocate at AWS. And I guess I do stuff on this whole Twitter's

Antony 0:24
Hi, I'm Antony. I'm the CTO of a startup called biank. I'm a supposed Svelte maintainer. And yeah, that's about it really, I'm also going to introduce the guest, because I know everything there is to know about Luke. So our guest is Luke. And Luke is not Australian. That's the first most important thing there. And so Luke Edwards is an Australian Californian, that's very important to know. He's also a co maintainer of Svelte. And he's the creator of polka, which is an express alternative, which is focused around speed. And also modularity, I believe. And he's been recently involved in deploying loads of stuff to CloudFlare work, which is interesting, this whole talk on that you can watch, it's also worth mentioning that Luke owns the most number of open source modules on NPM out of anyone. And that's a fact, really, anything you want to add to that, that's not true.

Luke Edwards 1:20
And that's pretty much it, I do do a lot of stuff in the open source world. And I imagine we'll talk about some of that. But for the most part, just keep my head down and enjoy building things. So that's kind of what that means contract work or salary positions doesn't really matter. I just love to get my get my hands dirty.

Antony 1:37
So you don't code for money. As a rule, you code for passion. And money is a convenient side,

Luke Edwards 1:42
I code for interest, I kind of tell I turn away a lot of not a lot. But I turn away clients with that sometimes, just because if I if I'm not interested in it, then it's not gonna turn out well, and I'm gonna find excuses to try to stop doing it.

Antony 1:56
Nice. It's funny, because I saw Twitter so quite recently about actually, what got you into tech. And the amount of people who replied by just showing a little bullet emoji was quite shocking. Actually, I couldn't imagine being it just for the money just wouldn't work for me.

Shawn 2:11
I mean, I'd say I'd say it's partially for the money for me.

Antony 2:16
Fair enough. I mean, it's not you have a passion in it. Right. You have you you enjoy what you do you enjoy advocating as well, and that sort of thing. But just for the money, just, and they enjoy life, right. Enjoy life first. And then yeah, like,

Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 2:29
I don't I don't think I could see myself doing something I didn't want to do. Don't want to do

Antony 2:35
No, definitely not.

Luke Edwards 2:37
It's also kind of amazing, because like, some people would make like hard career changes, right? Where they're like struggling and stuff, and they'll invest the six months, whatever it is, maybe less, and, like, dramatically turn their lives around. So it does start as just money. But like it's so that they can actually do something else and get by better. That's a good point. Maybe people can grow a passion for it when they start doing it. Maybe that's how they got into it. But that's not how they how they were they were maybe

Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 3:05
i think that's that's definitely true.

Luke Edwards 3:07
I think that's actually kind of at the core how I started to like, I actually was like, enrolled in med school. I hadn't started I was doing all the like, prereqs and stuff.

Antony 3:16
wow

Luke Edwards 3:16
I guess, disclaimer, self taught. But I was maintaining a nutrition blog to kind of like Chronicle my journey through what would be med school and stuff. And as I'm preparing and like working on this, how do I make my WordPress do expert? How do I make this better? I just unfolded more and more. And at some point, like someone just handed me a client said, Hey, do you think you can build this? Sure, I'll give it a crack. And I got paid. I was like, Well, why? Why am I gonna sign my life away for another like six to 10 years before I start getting paid? If I can just do this now? And yeah, then a passion developed? Because just questions be folded more questions, though.

Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 3:56
So you started in WordPress, then? Yeah, your coding career? Yeah. Yeah.

Luke Edwards 4:02
Luckily, I have not touched it. And it's been a decade, but it's still alive. It's still kicking.

Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 4:10
So can you take us through what what your journey has been from WordPress to where you are now.

Luke Edwards 4:18
So I mostly started as a designer, actually. So I was doing my own WordPress stuff. And you always focus on design, and I wanted to cool carousels and stuff. So my first that first client I was talking about was mostly a design work. And then I just implemented it and like basic HTML, CSS, which was all it needed, was mostly design base, and then, you know, a cup that lended itself to other projects that basically I got lucky and it became like word of mouth thing because they knew no one. So all those sort of projects just sort of like honed my design skill set, but then it also honed more front end work. So I basically I started going from backbone route into Marionette and then into I stuck with Riot for a long time. But basically a lot of fun and work in that at some point over, like the next three or four years I started having to work with, or alongside backend engineers, so back into WordPress back into custom PHP stacks, so a lot of Code Igniter, a lot of beginning Laravel stuff. And so I just that gave me some the beginnings of the full stack experience. And then I became more full stack key on future clients, same clients or new ones, and basically lived with a foot in each world fo...