An interview between Lee Robinson and Rich Harris on Svelte. Link to heading Highlights from the conversation Link to heading Tell us about your first popular project. What was it like going from building a project for fun to seeing a lot of people use it—and how does that change the dynamic of building open source? Rich: 'Popular' is definitely a relative term, but the first big project that I worked on was actually Svelte's predecessor. It was a thing called Ractive, which I released the first version of in 2013. It actually came out about the same time as React. I remember I was working on it and getting ready for a public release, and the React announcement appeared on Hacker News a month before we were ready. I remember thinking, Ugh, there's no point now. What a waste of time. But I launched it and it had a pretty good reception. React was not yet the thing that everyone had to do, and so the market hadn't decided yet.…