Josh is a software engineer who graduated from the University of Bristol with a master’s degree in computer science. Upon graduating, he began working for Bloomberg in London. After moving around and working in various roles within the company, he ended up on the infrastructure team.

Josh mentions that working through code that you didn’t write, and converting it to Typescript, is a fantastic and effective way to learn the code base.

He talks about the approach he uses when taking on a large-scale migration, such as the one he handled at Bloomberg, stating that building a dependency tree for the application is quite useful. He says that a good place to begin the conversion is the leaves of the tree. The reason for doing this is that any file that imports other files that are not TypeScript either needs to be converted to TypeScript or have type definition files written.

Josh talks about type validation within TypeScript in order to eliminate runtime errors - for example - checking if a property is a particular type of DOM node.

He also mentions the improvements in typing higher-order components within React TypeScript compared to how difficult it was in its earlier days.

Show Notes* https://www.bloomberg.com/ * Josh on Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshjhargreaves * https://github.com/joshjhargreaves/DefinitelyTyped