TypeScript Conf - The Aftermath
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the inaugural TSConf in Seattle, WA with a few of my Esri buds.
This was the first ever conference focused specifically on TypeScript. It was also my first time in Seattle, and I think I happened to be there in an ideal weekend, because it wasn’t even cloudy, and just a little drizzle one morning. It was beautiful out there! This was a one day event, packed with lots of great talks!
It was a lot of fun, kicked off by a keynote from Anders Hejlsberg who is the architect for TypeScript at Microsoft, and has an impressive resume of working in languages. Anders provided some insight into the early days of TypeScript, some of the early motivations.
Josh Thomas of Ionic kicked off the first tech presentation to talk about StencilJS, which is written in TypeScript and how it is used to create Web Components. This was really interesting and I thought it was very cool how Stencil can create the HTML related typings for your web components.
Next up, Sarah Higley of Sitepen gave us an interesting talk about design and accessibility when building your apps. The example provided was a simple button, but how differrent developers may create the interface for this button and what decisions each may make. It was a fun talk and a good reminder that accessibility matters.
Mohsen Azimi of Lyft showed a cool presentation on using Swagger to build Typed APIs and do some cool code generation. This was very interresting, because the types designated via the API are the source of your Types in your application. I was very intrigued.
We had a cool double team presentation from Bowen Ni and Radoslav Kirov of Google on how TypeScript is used at Google. There was some really cool info here on scaling TypeScript in a large org and on large projects, like Angular. There was some really cool tooling shown in this one!
Mike Lazer-Walker talked about how he used TypeScript to build some interesting games and some of the challenges he faced. In particular here, your code may work, but hardware is unpredictable!
David Sherret of Synaptive Medical showed some static analysis of TypeScript code using the TypeScript compiler. I had a short bout of using the TS compiler at one point for a test project, and he showed some really cool stuff to update source code I hadn’t considered before.
Devon Zuegel of Bloom gave a cool presentation on using TypeScript to validate your Webpack configs with TypeScript. She also provided some cool samples on how TypeScipt could have saved from some embarrassing mistakes.
The day was topped off with a sit down with some members of the TypeScript team. This was recorded for the TalkScript podcast which I’m sure will be out soon. There was some great questions and answers from the team here. It was a lot of fun and I look forwarding to listening to it again.
I should mention, the whole thing was emcee’d by stand-up comedian and part-time developer Nick Nisi who provided a plethora of puns and haikus between each presentation.
I had a great chance to meet some very cool developers and talk to the TypeScript team. I was glad to see that Esri was one of the sponsors for this event. We use TypeScript extensively to build the JavaScript API, so if that sounds like something you’re interested in, hit them up!
I look forward to this event next year! The whole team at Sitepen did a great job putting the whole thing together, thanks!