Jessica Kerr
ÜberConf
Denver · July 17 - 20, 2018
Lead Engineer at Atomist
Jessica Kerr is a developer of development systems. She works remotely from St. Louis, for Atomist, where she writes automations and automation infrastructure in TypeScript, Clojure, and whatever else is needed. She is a back-end developer who believes the front-end is most crucial. Jessica speaks at conferences in the US and Europe; find her on the >Code podcast (greaterthancode.com) and on Twitter and Medium as @jessitron.
Presentations
TypeScript: Because It's Useful
Rod Johnson, creator of Spring, says TypeScript his new favorite language. “It's just so useful!” After working in Scala, Java, and Clojure for years, I have to agree. TypeScript is a perfectly practical compromise. It's designed for developers, not theorists.
If you like static types, come learn what TypeScript offers that even Scala doesn't. Duck typing is charming when it includes unions and literals and partials.
If you hate static types, learn how to keep them out of your way until they become useful. There are tricks for this.
Shaving the Golden Yak
Programming is a series of frustrations. Everything we do, we could do better or faster if we only had our tools set up just so. If our error messages were a little better, our code a little cleaner, our tests a lot wider. When we spend time on this, it's known as “yak shaving,” and it can get messy.
How do you balance the work you’re supposed to be doing with the work that makes your work, work? Dive into the yak stack with me. We'll see five different species of yak, and discuss how and when to tackle each one. At the bottom of the yak stack, we might find the Golden Yak, with secret wisdom engraved on its skin.