Chris gives some small updates on working with Svelte. He really likes Svelte so far. Svelte's great. Modals are complicated. He also talks about using a little JavaScript library, called Quicklink. Steph talks about sending data to a third-party system and using feature flags to help deprecate some code.
Finally, they both riff on a listener question on consulting. Said listener asked, "Do you think about your work as 'consulting first' or as 'building great software first and then good experiences for your clients will follow naturally?'" Find out their take and give us your own, here on this episode of 'The Bike Shed!'
Bike Shed "Nate Berkopec" Episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/296)
Svelte (https://svelte.dev/)
Quicklink (https://getquick.link/)
Boring Rails: Skip the bullshit and ship fast (https://boringrails.com/)
mtime (File) - APIdock (https://apidock.com/ruby/File/mtime/class)
Transcript:
STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari.
CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey.
STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So hey, Chris, happy Friday. How has your week been?
CHRIS: Happy Friday. My week's been great, yeah. I've been writing a lot of code, moving things around, planning some features, and all that fun stuff that goes into building an app, so I'm enjoying that process. I'm also halfway through listening to your recent episode with Nate Berkopec, which was absolutely delightful, well, at least the first half that I've listened to so far. I assume the rest will continue to be absolutely delightful, but it does remain to be seen. So I'll report back next week when I've listened to the whole thing. But yeah, that's great. And I'm glad that Nate got to come on, and we got to share a little bit of his story as well.
STEPH: I like how clear you are in terms of like, "The part that I've listened to so far is great, but I reserve judgment until I've heard the rest of it." [chuckles] But that's awesome.
CHRIS: The thing about being a developer is it has broken my brain such that I am overly specific all the time because I just argue with a computer all day. It's what I do. So then I start talking to humans, and I'm like, wait, I should probably behave differently now. And I got to unwind some of those computer fights. But anyway, and let's see, small updates working with Svelte, really like Svelte. I'm leaning into it more and more and embracing...I think I'm starting to understand the aspects of it that I really like. And one of the things that I really like about it is that it is somewhat underpowered. And what I mean by that is working on React applications, I find that I can do some fancy stuff, and I can express it really well in TypeScript. And I can really go for it and create some components that are wildly variable and configurable and can take in any combination of props and do all sorts of things. And I can slice out tiny, little components and do all of this. When I'm doing that, I enjoy it.
But in Svelte, I have a little bit less power in my control. Svelte is closer to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript fundamentally. So you can make components, and I really like that. You can bundle up the pieces of functionality and display and formatting, and all of that, but it's not quite as powerful. It's not quite as expressive. And I've actually found that to be a useful limitation, which is an interesting frame. It's not something that I thought I would say, but I'm finding that the code that I'm authoring in my editor is so much closer to the code that's actually going to be presented to the end-user. That is really useful in my mind. I find that to be really valuable. There are small things like in Svelte; you can actually say class equals when you're trying to define a class on an HTML element. It turns out I really like that one instead of having to say class name or similarly