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

××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ×××

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

Shameless Plugs

Scott: Web Components 101 - Sign up for the year and save 25%!
Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax’ for $10 off!

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