I'm Feeling Thinner Already!

15 engineering hours later, I've migrated my client-side components to Svelte.  At least 4 of those hours were due to version mismatches, but I learned something valuable.  In package.json npm packages are often listed as "^1.2.3" which means "you may update this package to 1.2.4 or 1.3.0, but you may not update it to 2.0.0."

Foolishly, I believed in semver, thinking that the packages for major components would be vetted to prevent breaking changes from occurring.  Nope.  On a couple of different occasions, my local package was upgraded to another minor version, and it - to put it in the most technical terms possible - broke my shit.

The LLMs were no help, because they kept hallucinating Byzantine errors related to misformatted html or "known" bugs for versions I wasn't on.

Eventually, one suggested I check for version discrepancies and, voila, the root cause emerged.  I've now permanently etched "check for version mismatches almost immediately, even if you didn't think you upgraded" into my debugging steps.

And, while I miss htmx and _hyperscript, I'm happy with the consistency of Svelte.  It's slightly more verbose, but the syntax is a bit easier to parse.  After learning a few idioms, it's easy to crank out components and not have to worry about discrepancies in libraries that don't receive first-class support in Astro.

Speaking of Byzantium, in today's art history lesson, I'm revisiting the Hagia Sophia.  It was built to appear as if its interior is floating in the ether via clever architectural designs (it's known primarily for its use of pendentives).  Check it out!

Until next time, my human and robot friends.