I've wanted to launch one of my side projects for a very long time. I'm the kind of guy who loves starting things, but never finishes them. Well, this week I finally finished one of them, by launching The Joy of Svelte, my first online video course!

Finding inspiration in an old five-year plan

Back in December, 2019 (a year ago, but feels like a decade), I got a new notebook for Christmas, because I had filled up my old one that I use for meeting notes, To Do lists, and stuff like that. I started re-reading my old one, and saw that near the start, I had a five-year plan from December, 2015. I had a goal to expand beyond my freelancing business and launch my first video course in 2016, with the goal of continuing to create courses, apps and other products over the coming years. By the year 2020, I wanted to have a whole catalog of courses and products under my belt.

Well, when I reading that, four years had passed, and I still hadn't launched anything. Not a single app or course, other than the dozens of free videos I'd recorded for YouTube, and, of course, all the client work I'd done as a freelance web developer. But I still wanted to do something for myself, something of my own creation.

The disappointment and shame I felt while reading this was the push I needed to finally commit to this lifelong plan and stick with one of my side projects long enough to actually see it through to launch. So, in January, 2020, I decided that I would focus on the things I was most excited about: teaching, recording videos, and Svelte.

Trying to stay motivated by committing publically

I had it all figured out. I put up a landing page that said "Coming in the Spring of 2020", and publically announced that I was working on a new course. I committed myself to my newsletter subscribers and Twitter followers, I put out an announcement on YouTube, and then hoped that all the public accountability would force me to follow through and finally launch something.

Well, that was all back in February. Spring came and went, and I was still stuck planning and trying to decide on the course contents. In June, I had to update the landing back and change it to "Coming Summer 2020..."

Coding as a form of procrastination

I decided early on to self-publish The Joy of Svelte by developing my own video course platform. I'm a web developer, after all, and it's way too easy to feel like I'm being productive when I'm writing code. So in a way, it was a form of procrastination, because I could sit down to integrate Stripe, or create a video player interface, or write code to deal with emailing out access links, and feel like I was making progress. In reality, I could've just used one of the many video course platforms available and saved myself a lot of time and effort.

Having now built all that out, I'm happy I did, because now I can self-publish more courses in the future. But I realise now that I could have launched a lot sooner if I had focused on recording videos and spent less time writing code.

Pivoting to focus on learning objectives

I started to record some videos, with the idea of making an SVG drawing app using Svelte. I recorded three videos showing how to do this, until I got to a point where it was starting to be more about SVG particulars and less about Svelte.

Eventually, I came across some very useful advice about creating course content: identify what it is specifically you want people to learn, then go and teach those things. I know that seems super obvious, but somehow I'd lost track of that and was instead accidently trying to make a course teaching people to make an SVG drawing app, but I don't think many web developers have the need to make SVG drawing web apps.

I looked at the landing page I'd originally made, and saw that I'd already outlined some key topics that I was planning to include:

You will learn about:

• getting started with Svelte
• using templating syntax to render data
• data fetching strategies for components
• using components to simplify complex web user interfaces
• building custom stores for state management
• integrating Svelte into an existing web application
• ...and more!

I decided to make six new videos, each one focused on one of these learning objectives. It was a simple, straightforward approach that ended up working very well, because it kept me focused on what it is I wanted people to learn, and less on what cool thing I wanted to build as a code example.

Back to the drawing board

So I abandoned the SVG drawing app videos, and started from scratch. I looked for some simple free web APIs and found one for Nobel Prizes, and decided that I'd use that to show people how to fetch data from an API. It needed very little explanation, didn't introduce any new, unrelated concepts, and more closely resembled the kind of API that I'd often used to build web interfaces for my clients. It might not be super fancy or flashy, but it allowed me to focus on Svelte instead, which is what mattered.

Off screen, I sat down and built a UI for browsing, search and filtering Nobel Prizes, to see if that would work well for the videos, and it turned out to be perfect. It gave me lots of different opportunities to demonstrate various Svelte features, and plenty of ways to show off what makes Svelte a joy to work with, and all the different strategies for making clean, reusable web components using Svelte. None of it felt contrived, all of it was applicable to real world web applications. I was ready to start recording.

Early access pre-launch and a final push to finish

Summer 2020 was coming to an end, and I did not want to change the release date on the landing page again. So, in one day, I sat down and recorded three of the six videos. I uploaded them to YouTube as unlisted videos, and on the very last day of summer, I sent out an email to my newsletter subscribers announcing that Early Access was now available.

It felt so good when I had my first sale ever! And then another one came! And then, while I was sleeping, another one! People were actually willing to pay me for my videos! This was a huge milestone in my life and career, and really validated all the work I'd put into it.

Still, I had three more videos to record to finish it up.

Benefiting from my own misfortune

Then something horrible happened. I recorded two more videos in one day, but when I finished, it turned out that OBS had used the wrong microphone, and so the audio was total garbage. I had to painfully decide to throw those videos out and re-record them.

Actually, that turned out to be beneficial, because I wasn't totally happy with some of my examples, and ended up coming with better examples that demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of Svelte stores before I re-recorded the videos.

Launch day, and being too early

Three months after my Early Access launch, I had finally finished all the videos, and was ready to put the finishing touches on my web site, so that people could get a private link to watch videos directly on joyofsvelte.com instead of on YouTube. Using unlisted YouTube videos had felt a bit unprofessional, although I don't think anybody would have complained if I had stuck with using them.

Finally, on Monday, December 14th, 2020, I launched my first video course ever! I created a promotional video, and posted it with an emoji-filled tweet to Twitter.

On launch day I had two sales, and woke up the next morning to a third sale. I had tempered my expectations so that I wouldn't be disappointed, and so I was actually pleasantly surprised to make any sales that day. I'd figured most people who were excited about the course would have bought it during Early Access, and that turned out to be mostly true.

I also have come to realise that I'm probably way too early to be launching a course about Svelte. I chose Svelte because I'm so excited about it, and am happy to talk about Svelte endlessly, but the fact is, Svelte is not yet widely adopted amongst web developers, so there really isn't a huge audience there yet. It's still somewhat a niche topic. And that's okay, but it means that there was no way I was going to have a ton of sales on the first day.

There just aren't that many people learning Svelte right now. I think this will change over the coming months and years, and I'm glad to have put this course out into the wild to help people looking to learn Svelte. I hope it helps people to see what it is about Svelte that I find exciting, and why it has changed the way I approach web development altogether.

Lessons learned for the next course

This won't be my last course, it's just the beginning. Here are some lessons I've learned from building this course, that will change the way I approach building my next video courses.

1. I'll focus on learning objectives from the start. I'll make a short list of what I think people will want to learn about, and make videos focused on those points. The code examples I use will be chosen for how well they can demonstrate those key learning objectives.

2. I'll avoid perfectionism, and limit how much time I spend planning the course up front. Planning is a trap that I fell into, because you can keep planning the same thing forever. At some point you have to say "good enough" and start doing the actual work. Chances are, when you actually start recording the videos, you'll find out the best way to do things.

3. I ended up re-recording a lot of The Joy of Svelte by accident, and that benefitted me by allowing me to improve the content before recording the final videos. I will do this on purpose next time, maybe live streaming the content on Twitch, or possibly running a workshop beforehand, so hopefully I can get some useful feedback first as well. (And I'll try to remember to double check my microphone before recording the final videos!)

On to the next side project

One of the best things about launching The Joy of Svelte, is that I can now start working on all the other side projects and ideas I came up with this year, but wouldn't allow myself to work on until the course launched. If you're interested in following along, you can sign up for my newsletter.

And, of course, if you're interested in learning Svelte, check out The Joy of Svelte!

In case you missed it, Rich Harris gave a presentation at Svelte Summit 2020, where he announced that Sapper v1 will never be released! Instead, he showed what's coming next in Svelte itself.

Be aware that at the time of me writing this blog post, none of this is officially released yet, and very likely will change in the near future. Nonetheless, it's exciting to see a sneak preview of what the future of Svelte will look like.

Getting started

To get started today, you can run this command in your terminal, assuming you have npm installed: npm init svelte@next

In the future, it'll probably just be npm init svelte, which is super clean and easy to remember. This will be a nice change from having to run npx degit svelte/template my-template.

Here's what you'll see if you run this command today:

█████████  ███████████    ███████    ███████████  ███
███░░░░░███░█░░░███░░░█  ███░░░░░███ ░░███░░░░░███░███
░███    ░░░ ░   ░███  ░  ███     ░░███ ░███    ░███░███
░░█████████     ░███    ░███      ░███ ░██████████ ░███
░░░░░░░░███    ░███    ░███      ░███ ░███░░░░░░  ░███
███    ░███    ░███    ░░███     ███  ░███        ░░░
░░█████████     █████    ░░░███████░   █████        ███
░░░░░░░░░     ░░░░░       ░░░░░░░    ░░░░░        ░░░

Pump the brakes! A little disclaimer...

svelte@next is not ready for use yet. It definitely can't
run your apps, and it might not run at all.

We haven't yet started accepting community contributions,
and we don't need people to start raising issues yet.

Given these warnings, please feel free to experiment, but
you're on your own for now. We'll have something to show
soon.

It'll go on to ask you if you want to use TypeScript, which is really nice for those who like to use TypeScript, and nice that it's optional for those who don't.

Here's the full directory structure you will get with an initial installation:

├── .gitignore
├── package.json
├── README.md
├── snowpack.config.js
├── src
│   ├── app.html
│   ├── components
│   │   └── Counter.svelte
│   └── routes
│       └── index.svelte
├── static
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   └── robots.txt
└── svelte.config.js

Starting the dev server

Once it's done setting up files, you need to run npm install and then npm run dev to spin up the dev server. Here's what you'll see:

snowpack

  http://localhost:3001 • http://10.0.0.180:3001
  Server started in 643ms.

▼ Console

[snowpack] installing dependencies...
[snowpack] ✔ install complete! [0.59s]
[snowpack] 
  ⦿ web_modules/                                size       gzip       brotli   
    ├─ svelte-hmr/runtime/hot-api-esm.js        22.08 KB   7.4 KB     6.29 KB    
    ├─ svelte-hmr/runtime/proxy-adapter-dom.js  5.17 KB    1.65 KB    1.38 KB    
    ├─ svelte.js                                0.18 KB    0.15 KB    0.11 KB    
    ├─ svelte/internal.js                       52.36 KB   13.16 KB   11.36 KB   
    └─ svelte/store.js                          3.3 KB     1 KB       0.88 KB    


[snowpack] > Listening on http://localhost:3000

What is happening under the hood? This is very different from the Svelte and Sapper templates that came before. There is no longer a rollup.config.js nor a webpack.config.js, because it does not use Rollup nor Webpack, at least not during development.

Instead, it uses Snowpack to handle compiling and serving client-side resources. Snowpack does not bundle your resources, and relies heavily on JavaScript’s native module system, which means development is much faster. There is even a snowpack.config.js file which gives you a place to configure Snowpack to some degree:

// Consult https://www.snowpack.dev to learn about these options
module.exports = {
    extends: '@sveltejs/snowpack-config'
};

Building your application

There is now also a new svelte.config.js file, which lets you define an "adapter", used with npm run build to build your application into a production web site:

module.exports = {
    // By default, `npm run build` will create a standard Node app.
    // You can create optimized builds for different platforms by
    // specifying a different adapter
    adapter: '@sveltejs/adapter-node'
};

The default adapter will use Rollup to build your site into a Node.js web server. It seems that this web server doesn't use Express.js, though that might change as well, or maybe there will be a special adapter for Express.

If you want to have a purely static export, you can currently replace @sveltejs/adapter-node with @sveltejs/adapter-static, but be sure to run npm install @sveltejs/adapter-static as well.

In the future, there will be many other adapters, for example, building specifically for certain web hosting platforms, serverless architectures, and who knows what else? The cool thing about this adapter approach, is that you can build your web site without necessarily knowing how it will be built or deployed. You'll be able to change the adapter without changing your code.

Dependencies

Let's have a look at the package.json:

{
    "name": "demo",
    "version": "0.0.1",
    "scripts": {
        "dev": "svelte dev",
        "build": "svelte build"
    },
    "devDependencies": {
        "@sveltejs/adapter-node": "0.0.12",
        "@sveltejs/kit": "0.0.23",
        "@sveltejs/snowpack-config": "0.0.4",
        "svelte": "^3.29.0"
    }
}

Note that there are very few dependencies here. I really like how minimal this is. Both of the scripts are using the new svelte CLI from @sveltejs/kit, though that name might change, and it's not even available on GitHub yet. For now, you can look at the npm package.

Routes

You'll notice a folder src/routes/ where you can define your routes similar to how Sapper (or Next.js, etc.) let you define routes. Basically, your folder and file structure in here will map one-to-one with the routes on your web site. This is really nice, and easy to work with, especially if you're used to using PHP or other similar web development platforms.

If you're not building a static-only web site, you can also define server-side routes, similar to what you can do with Sapper. For example, you can create a file at src/routes/api.js:

export async function get(req) {
    return {
        status: 200,
        body: {
            hello: 'world'
        }
    }
}

If you're familiar with Sapper, you might notice that you have to return an object with status and body properties, instead of using an Express res object for your response. This is because it is not Express middleware. It uses an internal Node web server, with an API similar to what you may have used with some serverless cloud functions.

To create a layout component, to provide a consistent header and footer wrapped around all your routes, you can create a file called $layout.svelte, similar to Sapper's _layout.svelte.

You can also make an error handler route called $error.svelte, to handle 404s and other programming errors. It receives a status prop and also an error prop, so you can decide how to display the error to your users.

Migrating

Rich Harris notes that migrating from Sapper or other similar frameworks should be fairly straightforward, since most of the folder structure and other concepts are pretty similar. You'll probably just need to rename some files, and change how your server-side routes work, because they will no longer be written as Express middleware.

For fetching data for both server-side and client-side rendering, the Sapper approach of having a <script context="module"> block currently still works, though it's possible that will change.

Conclusion

If you're excited about all this stuff, it's definitely too early to start building your applications using it, but I'm willing to bet that it'll be a good choice to get started by using Sapper today, with the expectation that it'll be easy enough to migrate to this in the future, once it's ready.

To see a demo, check out Rich Harris' video Futuristic Web Development

If you're interested in learning more about Svelte, check out my video course The Joy of Svelte.

In many ways, time has been going very slowly amidst this pandemic, as we've all waited for case numbers to come down, lockdowns to lift, and vaccines to be tested. In other ways, time has been flying by. It's hard to believe I bought joyofsvelte.com almost seven months ago, and my initial Spring 2020 launch date is already months behind us.

I've never launched a product on my own before. I didn't realise how different it would be recording videos for a paid video course compared to making free videos for YouTube. If I'm going to expect people to pay, these videos have to be absolutely perfect. That means when I record them, I need to have a large block of uninterrupted time, completely free of distractions, and I need to be well-rested, in a good mood, full of joyful energy and inspiration.

Well, I have a four-year-old at home. I absolutely love being with my son all day, but there's definitely not much stillness around here, and any extra energy is either spent on getting some freelance work done, cleaning up the house, or trying to fit in a grownup movie or game before bed.

Last weekend, my wife took my son to a socially distanced birthday party, which marked the first time I had the house to myself in four months. I got to sleep in too, so I was well-rested, in a quiet house, full of joyful energy and inspiration. It was time to finally record. And I did! I recorded two more videos. Well, one and a half before they came back home. But I had momentum, so while we let my son quietly play Mario Kart, I went and finished the second video!

It's hard to find time for side projects. It's even harder when you have such high standards for that time. They say that perfect is the enemy of good, and I'm coming to realise that something like a video course can never be perfect anyway. I can only do my best with the time and energy I have available. I'd rather finish this course and share my experience and insights on using Svelte with the world, than to plan it forever and never launch.

I wrote that tweet back in May and obviously I've failed to take my own advice. But I'm not giving up. I'm going to keep at it and keep trying to find the time. We're probably going to keep my son home from school this fall, so it doesn't look like I'll have a quiet house for a long while. I'm going to have to get creative and find a way to make it work.

I hope you're able to find some time for your own side projects too, and know that you're not alone in that struggle. We usually only see people launching projects once they're already done. I'm sure there are countless more unfinished and unlaunched side projects that the world will never know about. Don't let your side project become one of them.

When you learn Svelte for the first time, there are lots of little things that put a smile on your face. Some of the little shortcuts are so elegant, they make things so much easier with cleaner, more succinct code. I recorded a video for YouTube with a demo of seven of my favourite features put together.

1. bind:property

In Svelte, you can very easily bind a property of a DOM element to a local variable. For example, you can bind a variable to the value of an input.

<script>
let name = '';
</script>

<input bind:value={name}/>

2. Directive shortcuts

There's a bunch of really cool shortcuts in Svelte that make using directives and passing props even more succinct. If the property name and variable name are the same, you can write them like this:

<script>
let value = '';
let active = false;
</script>

<input bind:value class:active/>

It's shortcuts like this that make Svelte a real pleasure to work with.

3. Scoped CSS

In your Svelte components, any CSS inside a <style> block will be scoped to that component. That means, a lot of the time you won't need to add classes or IDs for styling. You can often just use the tag name for styling, without any risk of messing up the CSS of the rest of the page.

<style>
  /* No class needed! */
  button {
    font-size: 200%;
    background: red;
  }
</style>

<button>Click me</button>

4. DOM Event Modifiers

If you've ever added a submit handler to a form, or a click handler to a link, and you wanted to handle the event without having the page refresh, you've had to call event.preventDefault() in the handler function. Svelte makes this super easy using a "modifier".

<script>
function handleSubmit() {
  // don't need to call preventDefault in here anymore!
}
</script>

<form on:submit|preventDefault={handleSubmit}>
  <input type="submit"/>
</form>

5. Loop "else" clause

How many times have you written an if statement to check if an array is empty, so that you can display a special "nothing here" message? Svelte makes this very easy by providing an "else" clause to the {#each} block:

<script>
let results = [];
</script>

{#each results as result}
    <p>{result}</p>
{:else}
    <p>Sorry, no results found!</p>
{/each}

6. Transitions

Whenever things appear and disappear on your page, it's really nice to use CSS transitions to have a bit of animation to make the state change feel more natural. Normally, you have to write a bunch of CSS and JavaScript to pull this off, but Svelte makes it super simple. All you have to do is import the effect you want and use the transition: directive on an element, and whenever the element appears or disappears, the transition will play.

<script>
import { fade } from 'svelte/transition';
</script>

<div transition:fade>
  This will fade in and out.
</div>

7. Slot props and the let:variable directive

My absolute favourite Svelte feature is the ability to pass data down from a component to its children. In React, the common way to achieve this is either with a function child or a render prop, and this often makes the code harder to read and understand.

Svelte builds this functionality right into the template syntax. You add a <slot/> element to the parent component, and pass props to it. Then, you receive the data using the let:prop directive:

<!-- ColorManager.svelte -->
<script>
let colors = ['red', 'green', 'blue'];
</script>

<slot {colors} />

<!-- Colors.svelte -->
<script>
import ColorManager from './ColorManager.svelte';
</script>

<ColorManager let:colors>
  <ul>
    {#each colors as color}
      <li>{color}</li>
    {/each}
  </ul>
</ColorManager>

This makes it really easy to write components that are solely responsible for data fetching and management. This allows you to separate out your rendering logic from your state logic, and end up with much simpler code.

Conclusion

Svelte has a ton of really cool features and syntax that make your web components simpler than ever. I've outlined a few of my favourites here. If you're interested in learning more, check out The Joy of Svelte.

The last few weeks on Twitch, I've been working on the user authentication to use for my side projects, including my upcoming course The Joy of Svelte.

I wrote it in a generic way as Express middleware. It uses a MySQL database with express-session and express-mysql-session. It doesn't have any HTML, it just adds a REST API to your server with some routes like /auth/signup, /auth/login, /auth/forgot and /auth/reset. This way, each of my sites can have a different UI, and use fetch to do everything.

Oh man, I wasted so much time when I was building it. I wanted to try building the whole thing with pure ES modules. ES modules are now supported in Node without a flag, so I figured it's finally time to use them without a build process.

I wasted hours trying to get it to work. Of course Mocha doesn't work with ES modules yet. Eventually, I gave up and went with using a library called esm that gets things working somehow. When I thought I was done, and tried to add it to a Sapper project. Since it was now in my node_modules, and being transpiled by Rollup, it all broke. Sigh.

I was facing another never-ending black hole of googling and debugging. So you know what I did? I went and rewrote the ES modules to CommonJS syntax. It took three minutes.

Lesson is, just because a new feature is available, you still have to wait for your entire tool chain to catch up and adapt as well. It's fun to push the envelope, but it can get exhausting too. Sometimes it's faster to cut your losses and take another route.

As Kenny Rogers warns, "You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run."

If you're curious about the authentication middleware, you can see the source code here. It's not perfect for everybody, but if you want to use it and think I should publish it to npm and document it, let me know.