Thoughts on Svelte(Kit), one year and 3B requests later

It's a short term problem because most popular libraries will get updated eventually, but some won't and they'll only ever work on the client side.

In the case of Next, maintainers need to package their libraries differently to support ESM modules, or you need to configure your project to use the experimental.esmModules=false flag. Again, it's not a particularly big problem but it does reduce the size of the available ecosystem a bit.

I felt like fighting this fight alone for years in the golden years of node, webpack and react where everybody was creating crazy stacks and adding GraphQL and so on, to basically get what Django + jquery did 10 years ago in a tenth of the time and code.

So far I also survived:

- xml is the future

- let's use nosql for all the things

- you must use the same language at the back and front

- yes, you site must have an AMP version (ah, you forgot this one, didn't you? It was sooo imporant, and then pouf, it was gone like tear in the rain)

- yes, your home page must be an SPA

- you can't code anything without async

- you can't live without a message queue

- everything must become a micro service

- of course you need a container for that

- of course you need a orchestrator to organize those containers

- of course you need the cloud, it would be crazy to deal with those containers and orchestrators yourself

- dude, why do you have a server? Use a serveless backend!

- dude, why do you have a backend? Just call saas from the edge!

Every year, some generation of engineers have to learn the concepts of "there is no silver bullet", "use the right tech for the right problem", "your are not google", "rewriting a codebase every 2 years is not a good business decision", "things cost money".

Our desktop app builder is also built on Svelte (not SvelteKit).

I agree with pretty much everything in this article. I wouldn't put "Reactive declarations and statements" in the "Ugly" section though. They are definitely a bit tougher to fully grok than the rest of Svelte (Svelte is incredibly easy to learn compared to other frameworks) but once you learn how they work they are incredibly powerful and concise.

I also feel like "Svelte’s lack of protagonism" is a bit off the mark. Rich Harris is a great communicator and tends to be pretty public but the focus is more on community. Svelte Society's Youtube channel [2] does a 1 hour long "This week in Svelte" video every week and it is all killer content with no filler.

[1] https://www.todesktop.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/@SvelteSociety/videos

It was completely unnecessary, and most importantly, cost the industry a fortune. If you are older, you have been wondering why you need to work more to achieve less. To me this has been demoralizing, and actually put me through some tough cycles of depression. I no longer enjoy this job. I used to DO things and walk away from my desk every day having a sense of achievement. Now it takes 3 days to set up your microservices locally just to reproduce a bug, apparently because your system with moderate traffic needs to look like Shopify.

Bad example - Shopify is a monolith.

Recently I spent a couple days building the same web app in Next, Nuxt, and SvelteKit just to get a feel of how to build a web app today. The web app was pretty basic. A couple of pages showing data from different apis and auth with user setting page.

My favorite by far was SvelteKit despite being the one with the smaller community. It was actually enjoyable compared to the others. It was very easy to feel like I was actually building something. You feel productive right away. The app automatically felt well organized with how the file layout was. Everything belong in a specific place. Layout goes here, Server stuff goes there, pages go here. Even form processing with nice. Building components was like building components in regular JS.

Next was my least favorite mostly due to the syntax and how you had to build the application. I really didn't like the whole style of Next and React. Just felt dirty.

I would highly suggest people to try SvelteKit. The file names might be a bit weird but it will teach you to use file finder in your IDE.