Nathalia is the co-founder and engineer at Custodian. She is a self-taught software developer of five years. She studied politics at university before progressing through a boot camp where she fell in love with coding. Nathalia is a huge advocate for Typescript.

Nathalia talks about the several ways companies can choose to migrate code to Typescript, mentioning that a hybrid approach is her preferred method, where Typescript and Javascript are allowed to coexist harmoniously during the migration period, with larger companies typically opting for an “all-in” get it type style of migration.

She talks about the value of onboarding a junior engineer and states that letting them try and work through pieces of the migration on their own with minimal assistance is very important for professional growth while maintaining the support of a more senior developer.

Nathalia speaks about how learning Typescript (as with any new language) can help you become a better engineer on a general level, as it opens your mind to new ideas and methods that you may not have thought about. She mentions that the weakness of Javascript lies in its chaos. Nathalia believes that Typescript is an enhancement of Javascript, helping to minimize this chaos and making it easier to write higher-quality code.

Nathalia ends the interview with advice for any teams considering migrating to Typescript - understand the areas in your code that should be prioritized. She suggests starting with the API in order to define what is being received from the back end to better see what needs to be handled on the front end.

Show Links* Airtable: https://github.com/Airtable/typescript-migration-codemod * Twitter: https://twitter.com/yeahgirlscode * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yeahgirlscode/ * TS Migrate: https://github.com/airbnb/ts-migrate