This post is a a little different from most that sit on my site. It's the story of the Definitely Typed project, of which I was an early member. It had a seismic impact on the development of TypeScript. When exchanging messages with Andrew Branch (member of the TypeScipt team), I realised it was an untold story, and perhaps I should tell it, before I forget! So I did, and this is it.

I named it "Definitely Typed: The Movie" as the name entertained me. Little did I know, that a few years later, a documentary would be made about TypeScript, and I'd be in it; in part thanks to writing this history. You can see more about that here.

For now, back to Definitely Typed...

With TypeScript 3.4, a new behaviour landed and a magical new file type appeared; .tsbuildinfo

A long time ago (well, 2012) in a galaxy far, far away (okay; Plovdiv, Bulgaria)....

I did ponder calling this post "how to enable a good TypeScript developer experience for npm modules that aren't written in TypeScript"... Not exactly pithy though.

This post demonstrates how you can hard code user authentication claims in ASP.NET Core; a useful technique to facilate testing during development.

The fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin has, since its inception, performed two classes of checking:

Yarn PnP is an innovation by the Yarn team designed to speed up module resolution by node. To quote the (excellent) docs:

I'm one of the maintainers of the fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. Hi there!

This is going out to all those people using react-select with 1000+ items to render. To those people typing into the select and saying out loud "it's so laggy.... This can't be... It's 2019... I mean, right?" To the people who read this GitHub issue top to bottom 30 times and still came back unsure of what to do. This is for you.

I'm somewhat into code golf. Placing restrictions on what you're "allowed" to do in code and seeing what the happens as a result. I'd like to share with you something that came out of some recent dabblings.

I recently had need to be able to access the API for Google Analytics from ASP.Net Core. Getting this up and running turned out to be surprisingly tough because of an absence of good examples. So here it is; an example of how you can access a simple page access stat using the API:

It's time for the first major version of fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. It's been a long time coming :-)

This post demonstrates a mechanism for proxying HTTP requests in ASP.NET Core. It doesn't proxy all requests; it only proxies requests that match entries on an "allowlist" - so we only proxy the traffic that we've actively decided is acceptable as determined by taking the form of an expected URL and HTTP verb (GET / POST etc).

All I ask for is a compiler and a tight feedback loop. Narrowing the gap between making a change to a program and seeing the effect of that is a productivity boon. The TypeScript team are wise cats and dig this. They've taken strides to improve the developer experience of TypeScript users by introducing a "watch" API which can be leveraged by other tools. To quote the docs:

I'd been meaning to automate the npm publishing of ts-loader for the longest time. I had attempted to use Travis to do this in the same way as fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. Alas using secure environment variables in Travis has unfortunate implications for ts-loader's test pack.

It all started with a GitHub issue. Ernst Ammann reported:

One thing that ASP.Net Core really got right was caching. IMemoryCache is a caching implementation that does just what I want.

If you're a user of Jest, you've no doubt heard of and perhaps made use of snapshot testing.

I recently had the good fortune to help run a coding bootcamp. The idea was simple: there are many people around us who are interested in programming but don't know where to start. Let's take some folk who do and share the knowledge.

Love me some Font Awesome. Absolutely wonderful. However, I came a cropper when following the instructions on using the all new Font Awesome 5 with React. The instructions for standard icons work fine. But if you want to use brand icons then this does not help you out much. There's 2 problems: