Conditional Types in Typescript

This post is about conditional types in typescript, which happens to be an interesting and powerful feature of the typescript's type system. It is part of the Introduction to Advance Types in TypeScript series.

Conditional types can be seen as a mechanism that allows us to perform ternary operations on types. 

Normally, ternary operations work with values, for example:

resulting value == true ? value A : value B
let value = 10
const isEven = value % 2 == 0 ? true : false

Conditional types gives us the ability to perform similar operation on types. Where we get a type out of two possibility, depending on the outcome of a check. 

any, unknown and never types in Typescript

This post will be a quick overview of three interesting types in Typescript: any, unknown, and never with the aim of quickly explaining what they are, and when to use them. It is part of the Introduction to Advance Types in TypeScript series.  

To start with, it is a good mental model to view Types from the perspective of set theory. This idea is fully explored in Union and Intersection Types in TypeScript, but for a quick summary, the idea is simple. When types are created, see it as similar to defining a Set. And what do sets contain? they contain objects. The next thing is to see values as objects that belongs to a set. A value defined to be part of a set, would not be allowed in a different set which it does not belong in or overlap with. 

Tuple Types in TypeScript

In this post, we would be looking at tuple types in TypeScript. It will also touch on generic rest parameters and variadic tuple types which are two of the advanced parts of tuple types. 

I'm on a roll! 😅

Just this Tuesday, 9th of March, at work, I was partly responsible for a partial downtime of a critical piece of the internet's infrastructure. 

This morning, I got two packages delivered to my place. One for myself, the other, to keep for my neighbor who wasn't at home. A combination of miscommunication with the delivery guy and excitement to unwrap my package, I ended up tearing up my neighbors package, mistaking it for mine! 😅. It was super awkward explaining my little mistake to her, when she came to pick her stuff up 😬. 

And fast forward to just a couple of hours ago, I mistakenly pushed a property file containing sensitive credentials to Github! Impact not super devastating but still, some damage control had to be done! 

It feels like I am on a roll here...what will I be tripping over next? What will the next gaffe be? Me dropping the database in production? 😅😬

Spread and Rest in JavaScript

What does the rest parameter syntax look like? 

Simple, It looks like this: ...stuff

That’s cool. What about the spread syntax? What does that look like?

Well, it also looks like this: ...stuff

And this is why the spread and the rest parameter syntax could be confusing and easily misplaced for each other. They have precisely the same syntax! What then separates them? Answer is the context they are used.

This post will look into these JavaScript syntaxes with the aim of disambiguating them. The hope is that it helps in removing the confusion.

Introduction to Index Types in TypeScript

This post will look at Index Types in TypeScript. It will go over what they are and also touch on two type-operators related to them. These type operators are the index type query operator and indexed access operators. 

This post is part of the Introduction to Advanced Types in TypeScript series. To better understand, it requires having some familiarity with Union Types, Generics, and Literal types. These are topics that have already been covered in the series.

Overview of Indexable Types In TypeScript

This blog post will look at Indexable Types. It is part of the Introduction to Advanced Types in TypeScript series.

In JavaScript, there are values, from which additional values can be retrieved via an index. A natural example of such a value is an Array: For example, given the following array:

const primaryColors =  ["red", "green", "blue"]

The value primaryColors is an array value, and its individual content can be accessed by providing an index of type number:

console.log(primaryColors[0])
console.log(primaryColors[1])
console.log(primaryColors[2])