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A Fresh Look at TypeScript / Lighting Talk

About a month ago, I gave a lighting talk at the Node.js Houston meetup titled A Fresh Look at TypeScript. The pitch for the talk was:

You’ve been seeing more and more about TypeScript lately but you might not have given it a serious try. We’ll take a fresh look at this strongly-typed JavaScript superset and see what all the hype is really about and whether TypeScript makes sense for your next project. We’ll talk about the advantages it brings along with some of the more interesting features it has including generics, decorators, async/await, and developer tooling.

I’ve been using TypeScript for the past 2 1/2 years and have really enjoyed it. Preparing and giving this talk was a joy because I love the thought of getting other’s interested in something I enjoy but also because I learned some new things along the way. In particular, I learned just how much the use of TypeScript has accelerated recently. It made the top 15 most popular languages on GitHub list. That is significant; it’s really nice and encouraging to see. Also, I gained an appreciation for some more recent improvements to TypeScript that make its ergonomics much more friendly. I previously didn’t quite have the historical perspective to appreciate these things as I now do.

Anyway, it was a fun talk to give and I’m glad I did it. Here is the presentation - enjoy!

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