My name is John Reilly. I'm a full stack developer based in London, UK. I'm just coming to the end of a contract (due to finish in April 2017) and I'm starting to look for my next role.

I've been using Visual Studio for a long time. Very good it is too. However, it is heavyweight; it does far more than I need. What I really want when I'm working is a fast snappy editor, with intellisense and debugging. What I've basically described is VS Code. It rocks and has long become my go-to editor for TypeScript.

Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes of open source projects? One that I'm involved with is ts-loader; a TypeScript loader for webpack. Yesterday was an interesting day in the life of ts-loader and webpack; things unexpectedly broke. Oh and don't worry, they're fixed now.

Or perhaps I should call this "@types and repeatable builds"....

I have had a *great* week. You? Take a look at this blog. Can you see what I can see? Here's a clue:

Sometimes you write a post for the ages. Sometimes you write one you hope is out of date before you hit "publish". This is one of those.

webpack 2 is on it's way. As one of the maintainers of ts-loader I've been checking out that ts-loader works with webpack 2. It does: phew!

Hands up, despite being one of the maintainers of ts-loader (a TypeScript loader for webpack) I have not been tracking webpack v2. My reasons? Well, I'm keen on cutting edge but bleeding edge is often not a ton of fun as dealing with regularly breaking changes is frustrating. I'm generally happy to wait for things to settle down a bit before leaping aboard. However, webpack 2 RC'd last week and so it's time to take a look!

Like Captain Ahab I resolve to sync the white whale that is webpack's enhanced-resolve... English you say? Let me start again:

Occasionally I flatter myself that I'm alright at this development lark. Such egotistical talk is foolish. What makes me pause even more when I consider the proposition is this: my subconscious is a better developer than I am.

That's how I was feeling on the morning of October 6th 2016. I'd been feeling that way for some time. The target of my concern? ts-loader. ts-loader is a loader for webpack; the module bundler. ts-loader allows you use TypeScript with webpack. I'd been a merry user of it for at least a year or so. But, at that point, all was not well in the land of ts-loader. Come with me and I'll tell you a story...

Everyone loves curry don't they? I don't know about you but I'm going for one on Friday.

TypeScript 2.0 has shipped! Naturally I'm excited. For some time I've been using TypeScript to emit ES2015 code which I pass onto Babel to transpile to ES "old school". You can see how here.

Once More With Feeling​

I'm addicted to the ternary operator. For reasons I can't explain, I cannot get enough of:

I've been searching for a way to describe what the DefinePlugin actually does. The docs say:

Define free variables. Useful for having development builds with debug logging or adding global constants.

I'm a great lover of ES2015's Map. However, just recently I tumbled over something I find a touch inconvenient about how you initialise a new Map from the contents of an Array in TypeScript.

You may know that Angular ships with a cutdown version of jQuery called jQLite. It's still possible to use the full-fat jQuery; to quote the docs:

This technique actually applies to pretty much any web stack where you have to supply templates; it just so happens that I'm using Angular 1.x in this case. Also I have an extra technique which is useful to handle the ng-include scenario.

I'd like you to close your eyes and imagine a scenario. You're handed a prototype system. You're told it works. It has no documentation. It has 0 unit tests. The hope is that you can take it on, refactor it, make it better and (crucially) not break it. Oh, and you don't really understand what the code does or why it does it either; information on that front is, alas, sorely lacking.