Introduction

[00:00:00]
>> Welcome, everyone to the Svelte workshop coming to you from gorgeous Minneapolis. One of the things you cannot tell from watching Frontend Masters videos is that, we are not in fact in a gray prison. We are on the 36th floor of a building in downtown Minneapolis with some stunning views, especially on a day like today.

[00:00:14]
I've been looking forward to this for a really long time. I'm really happy that you can join us, hopefully we're gonna have some fun in this course. We're gonna be spending a lot of time together, so let me introduce myself a little bit. My name is Rich, I am a Principal Software Engineer at Vercel.

[00:00:31]
I live in New York City, Brooklyn specifically, though as you can tell from my accent, I am not from there. Things I love include music, I'm a trombonist, there's no trombone emoji, so, we have to settle for this nonsense. I like climbing, cycling, swimming, cooking, cheese, beer, mountains, and I love writing software.

[00:00:54]
I got into software, in a little bit of a roundabout way. After university I fell into journalism, at a time when the gray haired men running newsrooms were trying to figure out this thing called the Internet. And there was a lot of cachet and being able to understand computers.

[00:01:10]
And some of the most forward looking newsrooms, were using JavaScript to do new kinds of journalism, that involved interactivity and personalization and visual presentations of data. I was young and I was hungry and I wanted a piece of it. So, I started learning web development with the help of some friends and what I very quickly discovered is that, it is really hard, too hard to build apps on the web that work reliably across browsers and across form factors especially when you're dealing with things like transitions and animations as a core primitive for communicating concepts.

[00:01:44]
This is doubly true when you're working in the high pressure environment of a newsroom, where you're constantly working towards a deadline. So, right from the very beginning of my journey as a software development, I have been passionate about making it easier for people to build things on the web.

[00:01:57]
Not just people who build things on the web for a living, but also people who aren't constantly immersed in the soap opera front end development. All of that is what led to the origin of Svelte in 2016. Svelte began almost as an experiment designed to answer the following question.

[00:02:13]
What if we let compilers do the hard work for us? I've been working on it for almost 7 years at this point. For most of that time, it was kind of a side project, for the last 18 months or so, it's been my full-time gig at Vercel, which has been a friend of the project for a long time.

[00:02:28]
A lot of things have changed during that time, but the mission has stayed the same, to make building stuff on the web easy and fun. Luckily, I haven't had to do it alone. Svelte and SvelteKit have had hundreds of contributors supported by an army of community builders and content creators and financial backers.

[00:02:45]
There are tens of thousands of Svelte developers around the world, if not more, and it's a really fun community to be a part of. And if you go to svelte.dev/chat, you can join our discord. And in fact, I believe there are some people in the discord watching this together live right now, hi.

[00:03:01]
They've made a documentary about this, which you can watch on YouTube, it's called Svelte Origins. So, that's the back story. If you're here, I'm gonna assume that you are interested in learning Svelte and SvelteKit. And so, I'm not gonna blather on anymore about why you should learn those things, instead, we're gonna get into some housekeeping.

[00:03:17]
Firstly, who is this course for? Well, it's for everyone who builds stuff on the web or wants to build stuff on the web. If you've never used a framework before, that's fine. If your day job is working things with things like React, that's also fine. The only real requirement is that you do need to know HTML, CSS, and at least a bit of JavaScript.

[00:03:36]
Later on, you will need to be able to use Node and the command line. You do not need to be an expert in those things. We're also gonna dabble with a little bit of TypeScript. Although again, if you're not a TypeScript wizard, don't let that put you off.

[00:03:47]
It's gonna be fine. We're gonna cover the basic concepts. Then we're gonna learn some advanced techniques. And then, we're gonna put it all together by building a game, and specifically this game called ematchi. Got a lot of material to get through, so let's get into it. Internet, are you ready?

[00:04:04]
Attendees, are you ready? Don't think the Internet I can hear you. Attendees, are you ready?
>> Yeah.
>> All right.
>> [APPLAUSE].
>> Let's get into it.