In early 2016, I was working as a web developer on the marketing team at Xamarin. We had just built the event site for the third Xamarin Evolve, the company’s developer conference, to be held in Orlando in the spring. The event afforded an…

When I joined the TypeScript team, debugging quickly became my most valuable skill, and by the same token, the debugability of the compiler became one of the codebase’s most valuable assets. The TypeScript compiler is just a Node app so it…

When designing a React component for reusability, you often need to be able to pass different DOM attributes to the component’s container in different situations. Let’s say you’re building a <Button />. At first, you just need to allow a…

There was a brief period in my life, toward the end of my high school years and continuing on through most of college, during which some of my friends would have characterized me as a “music snob,” and I wouldn’t have argued. To be…

“Oh! Agh!” are the profound words with which I take the first pedals of a thousand mile bicycle tour across New Zealand. Two years ago, Jeb and I completed a trek of comparable length in Scandinavia, my first bike tour. I remember the…

I talked a little already about why I wanted to build a blog with interactive code, but I have to be honest: part of why I wanted to do this, and particularly why I chose not to use a prepackaged solution like Monaco Editor, was to see if I…

It’s all about the red squigglies. Red squigglies in Microsoft products have been saving me from looking stupid since the second grade, and now they save me from writing stupid code on a minutely basis. Well, significantly less stupid code…

One of TypeScript’s most underrated features is discriminated union types. Borrowed primarily from functional programming (FP) languages, they match an elegant FP concept to a pattern people intuitively write in JavaScript. Discriminated…