Book worth reading

Effective TypeScript - I underestimated TypeScript’s learning curve when I first started working with it. I knew JavaScript, I had worked with statically typed languages before, so I believed I knew everything there was to know. But TS is a language on its own with its own specifics. I didn’t spend enough time to learn it well and I kept tangling myself in awkward type conversions. It’s very much worth it to spend the time and explore some non-trivial scenarios with the language

Article worth reading

Three typescript tricks I wish I knew - This one is worth going through even for the “any vs unknown” part. Some irritating problems that you want to brush aside and solve quickly are actually features of the language. The compiler is often telling us about potential problems that we try to make workarounds for instead of handling properly.

Idea worth considering

TypeScript utility types - TypeScript has a few utility types that allow us to quickly extend and modify other types in common ways. Partial<T> makes every field of a type optional, Readonly<T> prohibits the properties of an object to be reassigned, Record<T, U> creates an object type whose keys are T and values are U, and there are many more.

Tools worth exploring

esbuild and swc are the two next-generation JavaScript/TypeScript compilers that are 10 to 100 times faster than Webpack. The main reason for their speed is they’re written in Go and Rust, respectively, and compile to native code. While Node is parsing Webpack's code, esbuild and swc are already bundling your application. Esbuild relies heavily on parallelism and utilizes memory much more efficiently than JavaScript-based solutions.

Quote worth pondering

"Make it work, then make it beautiful, then if you really, really have to, make it fast. 90 percent of the time, if you make it beautiful, it will already be fast. So really, just make it beautiful!" – Joe Armstrong