If you have been following discussion in the tech community during the last couple of years, there has been no way of avoiding countless people gushing over their newest toy: TypeScript, a programming language atop of JavaScript, which supposedly makes everything a lot better.

If you ever find yourself:

• writing JavaScript with libraries and frameworks you barely know
• writing JavaScript with others
• writing JavaScript that deals with back-end data
• writing JavaScript that your future self has to continue working on

then TypeScript will do right by you. This workshop lets you approach TypeScript from a JavaScript developer’s point of view. As a tooling layer on top of JavaScript, it formalizes our application’s behavior, so we get more productive and are less likely to run into errors.

With hands-on, real-world examples, we learn how to bend the type system to our needs. Your colleagues and your future self will thank you for that!

📘 All workshop participants will receive a complimentary copy of Stefan’s “Typescript in 50 lessons” eBook.

What Will You Learn In This Workshop?

• TypeScript as a tooling layer on top of JavaScript. How and why the two programming languages are connected to each other.
• Type system concepts like structural typing and substitutability.
• Control flow, type narrowing and widening, and working with literal types.
• Subtypes and supertypes
• How union types and intersection types can help you model your data.
• Why TypeScript is so great for data-oriented programming.
• The purpose of generics and their use with conditional types
• Function signatures and tuple types
• Use cases for string literal types
• Type development practices like dynamic static typing and low maintenance types
• How to stay up to date with four new TypeScript releases a year!

Who Is This For?

This is a full workshop, delivered in five 2-hour long sessions with lots of time for Q&A, and hands-on exercises.

This workshop is for developers who know just enough JavaScript to be dangerous. You spend an increasing amount of time programming and want to be more productive doing so. With TypeScript, you hope to get more information out of their JavaScript code, for themselves and their colleagues.

It is also for developers who dipped their toes into TypeScript and now want to get their feet wet. You want to learn about type systems and how they can be used to define complex JavaScript scenarios.

This workshop takes you from beginner to expert!

What Do You Need To Bring?

Your laptop with a modern browser, and a (free) Codesandbox Account. For more advanced use, we recommend VSCode and a familiarity with NPM.

About Stefan Baumgartner

Stefan is a software architect, trainer, and consultant based in Austria. Since the late 1900s, he has published writing for Manning, Smashing Magazine, and A List Apart.

His most recent work is “TypeScript in 50 Lessons”, a book all about TypeScript published by Smashing Magazine.

In his spare-time he organizes ScriptConf, TSConf:EU, and the local Rust meetup in Linz, and is host of the German-language Working Draft podcast.

Time & Schedule

This workshop is split over five days. Our virtual doors open at 8:45, we start at 9:00 AM PT.

The workshop sessions will run on the following days:

• Tue, April 19, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT
• Wed, April 20, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT
• Tue, April 26, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT
• Wed, April 27, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT
• Tue, May 3, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT

Day 1 — Approaching TypeScript

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat, and introduce yourself.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
We set the stage for TypeScript and write our first types, approaching it from different angles: As an on-demand tool for your scripts, an additional layer on top of your established tooling, or as a key item in your upcoming application.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Stefan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.

Day 2 — Structural Typing

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat, and what was most useful yesterday.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Learn all about the intricacies of a structural type system and why they work so well with a language like JavaScript.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Stefan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.

Day 3 — Type System Deep Dive

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat, and what was most useful yesterday.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
We get into the nitty gritty of TypeScript’s type system and learn all about primitive types, literal types, union types, and intersection types.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Stefan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.

Day 4 — Working with Generics and Conditional Types

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat, and what was most useful yesterday.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
With generics and conditional types we can model the most dynamic JavaScript behavior with just a couple of types. The type system becomes its own meta language!

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Stefan on the day’s material. Chat with each other.

Day 5 — Type Development Process

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat, and what was most useful yesterday.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
We take all we learned so far and establish a type development process to make the most helpful types with the least amount of effort.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Stefan on the day’s material. Saying goodbye!