w33 thoughts

a post after the long break

Open Source #

After a long break, I developed internal peace and energy started to fontain inside of me. I invested some time into my small npm package. The the package is a library that dereministically generates name and date of birth. It can be handy to those who want to fill data with fake personal data.

I "rewrote" the package to make use of TypeScript. I learned how to setup linter. (Though I still do not get why a separate formatter is needed apart from a linter.) I also getup continuous integration and continuous delivery. I used GitHub Actions and spend extra couple of hours because the documentation misses one line. 🤷‍♀️

In general this is not the first time and I think I enjoy the process and with every setup or iteration it is in general easier because more concepts are familiar and more common issues are expected. Concepts of actions/steps/stages/jobs and triggers are main elements of pipelines. Common issues are version mismatch between the node version and project packages or visibility of environment variables.

Books #

Riscutia, V., (2020). Programming with Types Shelter Island: Manning #

My mentor, Stefan Reichel, is a type wizard. He was quite into type system and showed a number of tricks for TypeScript. Here is one example of how optionality can be better typed:

type Maybe<T> = T | undefined;

One of Reichel's recommendations was to have a look at "Programming with Types". Riscutia gives in-depth example of the Mars Climate Orbiter that illustrates how deadly could carelessness to types be. He shows how unique symbol can overcome TypeScript structural subtyping. I found this charming.

I plan to invest a bit more time to complete the challenging exercises and see how can the author's examples live in different cases. My experiments can be found here. I particularly like iterators and want to learn more about this nice language construct/pattern.

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