Tan Li Hau on contributing to Svelte, his compiler handbook and much more!

Li Hau joins us to talk about his experience contributing to Svelte and how he got started. We talk about the best way to get involved as well as his compiler handbook. Enjoy!

Sponsors:

• Mono is a digital product studio that works remotely. Within the Svelte community you might know Wolfr he is a designer that worked on the Routify, Svelte Society day and Svelte Summit website. He wanted to sponsor this episode with a simple message: as a design team, they are open for client projects. They have extensive experience designing web applications with full-on custom design systems. Mono is typically responsible for the UI and UX in a project and they work alongside developer teams.
• Level Up Tutorials brings you cutting-edge, focused & high quality video tutorials for web developers and designers. Check out the Svelte For Beginners as well as Sapper for Beginners courses.

Links: 

• Compile Svelte in your head part one, two and three
• Compiler Handbook
• Plenti - an SSG/site builder for Svelte
• Shepard - a library for guiding users through your app
• Does Svelte Scale?
• Flare in Svelte

Meetups:

• Svelte Society Day France - September 27th, 13 talks!
• Svelte Brazil - September 1st 
• Svelte Philippines Facebook Group
• Svelte Summit is on October 18th - CFP and Sponsors can apply now

Picks:

• £700 dishwasher for £30 using Gorilla Glue
• GitHub changing of default branch
• Frontend Horse
• Kevin Powell YouTube Channel (CSS stuff!)

Transcription:

[00:00:00] KA: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Svelte Radio. Today, we have another guest. But first, let’s get into introductions. I’m Kevin. I run a site called Svelte School, where I teach you all about Svelte and what to do and what not to do in Svelte. Soon, we are going to have our first video course. Keep looking. Yeah, that's me.

[00:00:26] SW: Exciting. I’m Shawn. Hi. I’m also known as Swyx. I work at AWS as a developer advocate. What have I done with Svelte recently? I played around with Elder.js and I’m working on moving my own site over to Elder.js as a static site generator built in Svelte.

[00:00:42] AJ: Hi. I’m Antony. I’m the CTO of Beyonk, which is an adventure, well, a venture experience booking platform. I’m also a Svelte maintainer and I have very high CPU usage. Yeah.

[00:00:59] KA: All right. Our guest for today is Li Hau. You might know him from his contributions to Svelte. I’ll let him introduce himself.

[00:01:09] TLH: Hello, everyone. I’m Li Hau. I guess, my full name is Tan Li Hau. Tan is my family name. You can find me @lihautan on Twitter. Who am I? I’m a Svelte contributor as well, like Antony. A bit of myself; I’m currently in Singapore like Shawn, like Swyx. Actually, I’m originally from Malaysia. For those who don't know where Malaysia is, it's a Southeast Asia country right between Thailand and Singapore. That's where I’m from. It has better food, no offense, than Singapore. Although the culture-wise and weather and everything is almost the same.

I’m currently working at Shopee as a front-end developer. Shopee is this e-commerce platform, we would say the leading number one e-commerce in Southeast Asia. For those who don't know about Shopee, last year we had Ronaldo as our ambassador. It's very funny. I promise you. You can search for Shopee Ronaldo and we get him to do a baby shark dance with Shopee. That's hilarious. You have to check it out. I think a lot of people who are not in this region would think that Shopee and Shopify is related, but we are not.

[00:02:30] SW: I had a friend from Malaysia when I was young. His dad owned a restaurant in Manchester and one day he went to the restaurant and he said, “Order anything you like, any food you want, because it's all free. You can have anything you like.” It's amazing. I ordered my what I thought would be amazing dish and it came to the table. When it arrived, he immediately thought it was his and stuck his fork right in the middle of it and stuck it on his plate. I was like, “No.” Yeah, I didn't really eat much Malaysian food that day, sadly.

[00:03:02] KA: I would say the food in Malaysia is pretty good. I went a couple years ago. I like it.

[00:03:07] AJ: For those who get to eat, I’m sure it's wonderful.

[00:03:12] TLH: Hopefully, one day after the pandemic is over then, maybe you guys can come over and I can bring you guys around, hopefully.

[00:03:18] KA: Yeah, that sounds good.

[00:03:19] AJ: Amazing.

[00:03:20] KA: What got you interested in Svelte?

[00:03:23] TLH: Well, so I would say I was interested in the idea of Svelte early on. Maybe a bit more background about myself with the company. Basically, in Shopee, I’m on a so-called working platform-related stuff, which means that I work less on future related stuff, but more on fixing your webpack config and table config, upgrading labels and stuff. That's because I volunteered into this role and we made this role into me.

I was playing with all this webpack, Babel and all this stuff. Once in a while, we encounter weird bugs, because we upgrade to the latest version. I have to figure out why by basically reading the source code of Babel, for example, to figure out why. Then slowly and slowly, I get more familiar with them and I started to actually make code fixes and make a PR to them. That's how I get into open source.

At some point in time, I have this idea of you can play with Babel after a while, I was thinking, why don't we compile JSX and React into what ...