React, React, React.

I decided to document that crosses my mind, so here is a little rant.

I am someone how dislikes working with React, and I know very little about it. React brought a lot to front-end development. But I don’t think its dominance is great for our ecosystem for multiple reasons.

As a Svelte and SvelteKit user, we live in a different world. When everybody on social gets excited about a shiny new tool, we watch from afar and whether wait for this thing to be ported to our framework, or move on with our live.

I know it’s hard to build framework agnostic tools that are great. I know it doesn’t make sense to invest money and resources in every framework on earth when most of your customers will be companies using React (because they can’t use anything else, because they can’t hire non-React devs, because people learn React, because companies only hire React devs…)*

If I’m doing this challenge today, I never found a perfect auth solution that fitted my needs, and worked flawlessly with SvelteKit. Until Better Auth came in.

The experience for a non-React developer was ABSOLUTELY FUCKING FREAKING PERFECT! Pardon my french. Nothing was complicated in the documentation. Client, server, it’s all there. I actually pointed this out other members of the SvelteKit community recently, I don’t think us Svelte devs have hopes anymore when we hear about these fancy libraries.

Oh, and about that rant? Well, it came while implementing Autumn. I’m 5 minutes into a great setup documentation, and I feel like a second class citizen.

The docs tell me to do X if I use React, and that I don’t need that if I’m using Autumn purely on the backend.

Wait, so no Front-End option for me then?

It’s not a big deal. I stopped when I faced this line to share my immediate impression in this post, I’m pretty sure it’ll work just fine. I’ll keep you posted.

Autumn is really new company, What they’ve built is already impressing, the amazing support they provide on Discord, the Convex integration…

I think I reached the point where I’m skilled enough with SvelteKit to go around these little bumps on the road. When the tools are that good, it just makes me want to contribute and help them become more accessible to the Svelte community.

This note comes from a good place. I’ve seen the amazing work the companies and the open source community is doing to make thema accessible. Met great developer in Discords and niche Github repos. But let’s keep pushing for better.

PS: I should say a quick thank you to Thinkeo, my company, for betting on SvelteKit. So, Sam, Ben, Damien, if you stumble upon this post: thank you!