TypeScript for the Win!
There is no question JavaScript has become one of the most popular and widely-used programming languages. Unfortunately popularity doesn't necessarily translate to easy-to-maintain or always appropriate. Large code bases become difficult to reason over due to JavaScript's dynamic nature and flexible development style.
As a result of their own internal struggles with large JavaScript projects, Microsoft tasked Anders Hejlsberg of Delphi and C# fame to design a solution to the problem. The result is an incredibly useful, fun and effective approach to improving JavaScript development without impacting how you deploy your projects.
TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that brings static typing, modern JavaScript features that may not yet be supported in your environment and improved tooling and documentation. Surprisingly, the results are then transpiled down to whatever flavor of JavaScript you need for your runtime environment.
In this workshop, we will introduce to you:
- What TypeScript brings to the table and why you should care
- The new language features available
- Approaches to gradually adopt TypeScript in your project
- How runtime errors become compile time errors with types and static checking
- How your build processes do and don't change
- How to set up a more fun and productive (and hopefully less frustrating) development environment
About Brian Sletten
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.
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