Scott Tolinski talks Svelte, React and Podcasting

Scott Tolinski of Syntax.fm fame joins us to talk about Svelte, React and podcasting. Oh, and he has a new course on Svelte animations! Have a listen!

Check out his courses here: https://www.leveluptutorials.com

Picks:
- Scott: Q clearance - the hunt for QAnon (podcast)

- Kevin: Brandon Sanderson - Stormlight Archive (books)
- Shawn: Writing Excuses (podcast) and Acquired Podcast (podcast)

- Antony: That Chapter (YouTube Channel)

- Scott & Antony: JCS Psychology (YouTube Channel)

Transcription:

[00:00:00] KAK: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Svelte Radio. Today we have yet another guest. But before we introduce the guest, we're going to introduce ourselves. So I’m Kevin. I run a site called Svelte School, and I love Svelte, and I run this podcast as well. 

[00:00:19] SW: I’m Sean. I work at AWS, and I’ve been doing some work on the Svelte Society website recently. Got to give it some love. 

[00:00:26] AJ: Hi, I’m Antony. I’m a Svelte maintainer, mostly working on kit at the moment. And I’m also CTO of Beyonk, which is a booking system for tourism and leisure. 

[00:00:35] SW: And thanks for picking back up, hopefully. 

[00:00:38] AJ: They are. Well, yes. And it’s a tough one, but I think so.

[00:00:43] KAK: All right. So our guest today is Scott Tolinski. He is a friend of the show, sponsor and lover of Svelte it seems like, because I just listened to you on the latest SyntaxFm where you're the co-host. And when someone asked what's the best and easiest JavaScript framework for beginners, both of you answers Svelte, which is I think it's an interesting change from before maybe where you may not necessarily have said that. And Scott is – So I’m going to try and do an intro, because I feel like I’ve heard it so much, but then also you can fill in the gaps. I like that description that you always say like you're a full stack developer from Denver, Colorado. That's a mouthful, but it accurately describes everything. You run Level Up Tutorials, which actually I think started as a YouTube channel with some tutorials on some kind of design software that I have it in my watch list, but I haven't seen it yet. It's a huge channel. I think you're like 300 something K subscribers. But now it's a paid platform where you have monthly video courses. And then you're also a Bboy, and I always love watching your videos of your breakdancing. Is there anything that is typically not mentioned in intros that you'd like to share?

[00:01:55] ST: I don't know. I’ve been a developer for since 2011 professionally, but I’ve just been a lover of making websites for a very long time. I just like really find passion in this stuff. So whether or not that is like a part of my business platform or what I’m doing, like it was first and foremost like a hobby for me and the thing I kept going back to. So maybe that isn't often mentioned just like how much I truly love this stuff, and I think that's maybe something a little interesting or not. 

[00:02:27] KAK: Yeah. I mean I do see when you post updates about how you're changing the Level UP site, and you put some effort into the little details of the animations and stuff like that on the site and it really shows that you pay attention to the details. And it's mostly a one-man operation, right? Like you have some content creators, but it's mostly you.

[00:02:45] ST: Yeah. And I’ve had three guest creators and we just hired on our first like full-time developer last month. We've had a part-time developer for the past like year or so, a good friend of mine. And then now we have two devs working on it, one who's part-time and one who's full-time. And so it's a growing operation and we're hoping to have a bunch more guest content creators on next year. We have a few people signed on to do some really neat courses for us on stuff that are gaps in my knowledge base. 

It's funny because like some people are a little surprised that I can produce like a 20 video tutorial series in a month every month for a year. But I should say that I’ve been doing it since 2012. So like for me I have the flow and everything so practiced and I have the formula down to how I like to do things and how I like to learn things and how I like to explore topics that like, “Hey, when we started Level Up Tutorials, it was just a way to try to give back to the Drupal community specifically on YouTube because there was like no good Drupal content.” I was cranking three videos every Monday and Wednesday. So I was getting like six to nine videos a week. And I just did that for a billion years until now, and then it's like I’ve had all this practice to be able to do it. So it's like, “All right.” Well, I feel like I’m probably even producing less content than I used to just because it's a little bit more dialed in. 

[00:04:15] KAK: And you have a lot of courses on your on your site. I remember I took one of your Gatsby courses way, way back. It was really nice when I first got into to React. It was great. But then you also have Svelte courses, right? 

[00:04:33] ST: Yeah. 

[00:04:33] KAK: You had two of them before, right? You had the Svelte for beginners and Sapper for beginners, right? 

[00:04:40] ST: We had a Svelte course, a Sapper course and then now animating Svelte, which was the latest one that came out in October. And I’ve done a lot of animating React courses. So for me this one was interesting to be able to apply a lot of the same like, “Here are our basic animations you need to know, but then try to do them in a completely different system.” 

And like some of the stuff – It's funny, because we can get into it more, but some of the stuff in Svelte was like too easy. It's like, “Okay. In React, to do a fly-in animation, we have to pick a library,” because there's like eight libraries to pick from. You got to pick a library then you got to write the in and out and you got to worry about the mounting and unmounting. And then in like Svelte it's just like, “Oh! Import fly. Attach that directive to –” I feel like a fraud for teaching that because it's so simple. But then like if anybody's coming from any of their platform, they're going to see how nice it is. And to me that's the reason why we talked about Svelte being probably the best platform for people to pick up, because it's so simple like that. You don't have to make a lot of choices in those regards. 

I mean what we made a like a modal. I think the modal – I don't know what video that is, but we made like a modal in one of the videos. And it is like a really nice looking, like almost like the native animation that's on Big Sur and macOS type of looking modal. And it took us no time at all. It’s like just pop on a couple of directives on a couple things and bingo-bango! It's just working. 

[00:06:11] AJ: