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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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Cloudinary - Sponsor

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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
      • 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
  • 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

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} Links ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Shameless Plugs Tweet us your tasty treats!

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