Stories from the Blok #7: Intro to Svelte with Tan Li Hau

Stories from the Blok #7 focused on new and exciting frameworks. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Tan Li Hau – a software engineer at Shopee – took the stage to teach a little us a little bit more about Svelte. If you want to see him in action, take a look at the video below. Otherwise, you can continue on for a written recap.

Tan started off by covering the basics of Svelte. This framework compiles your code into optimized JavaScript. It’s similar to Astro in that it delivers less JavaScript to create a better user experience. Then, he wasted no time jumping right into a demo.

He explored how easy it is to define variables and input components to use in HTML. Svelte does this by precisely making changes rather than broadly – so you’re only modifying what you need to, no more and no less. That means your users will only interact with the most streamlined code possible. Svelte's different reactive declaration aspect also means that when you need to change something, you can do it once universally instead of hunting each instance down individually.

Tan closed out his demonstration by briefly introducing SvelteKit, the official Svelte application framework. He mentioned how using the two in tandem can make for a meta-framework that follows best practices, delivering a higher quality experience in less time.

Tan also sat on our panel at the end of the event – you can check out the video and written recap here. You can also check out what other experts like Fred K. Schott and Alex Jover Morales thought in their recaps.