front matter
I have been a professional software developer for 37 years and a web developer for around 10 years. My projects have used many technologies and frameworks, including raw DOM manipulation, jQuery, Ruby, Angular 1, React, Polymer, Angular 2+, Vue, Svelte, and probably some I have forgotten.
I place a high value on developer productivity. Unnecessary complexity really works against this. While I find many things to love about Svelte and Sapper, the main driver for me is their simplicity compared to other web development approaches. I know from my experience of using other frameworks that I am far more productive when using Svelte and Sapper.
My first exposure to Svelte came from watching a talk titled “Rethinking Reactivity” by the creator of Svelte, Rich Harris. It is a very compelling talk and definitely appealed to my desire to reduce the complexity of web development. That led me to dig in further, write a long article about Svelte, give talks at user groups, and expand to giving talks at conferences. The next logical step was to write this book!