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])

Using Literal and Template Literal Types in TypeScript

This blog post will look at some of the use cases of literal and template literal types in TypeScript. It is a continuation of Literal and Template Literal Types, which introduces the language feature and it is a part of the Introduction to Advanced Types in TypeScript series.

This post will look at the following use cases:

1. Compile time spell checker
2. Alternative to enum
3. Discriminated Union Pattern
4. Stricter Type Constraints and Type Level Computation

Literal and Template Literal Types

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

In the post, Union and Intersection Types in TypeScript, the idea of viewing types with the perspective of Set theory was introduced. The key idea is to see types more or less as sets, and values of a type as elements that belong to a set. If this idea of viewing types from the perspective of Set theory is new to you, then I’ll advise to take a pause and read Union and Intersection Types in TypeScript before continuing with the rest of the post, because it is a useful perspective to understand literal types.

Union and Intersection Types in TypeScript

This blog post will look at Union and Intersection types in TypeScript. It is part of the Introduction to Advance Types in TypeScript series.

Union and Intersection types are useful features of TypeScript. But they can come across as a bit strange, especially to developers coming from more traditional languages like Java, C#, etc. Hence in this post, I will first start with a background section. This will help in developing the fundamental perspective needed to understand and appreciate union and intersection types in TypeScript.  

Generic Constraints, Generic Methods, and Generic Factories in TypeScript

In Introduction to Generics in TypeScript the idea of Generics was introduced. It was shown how Generics provide a mechanism for having a balance between writing code that is flexible enough to apply to a broad range of types but not too flexible that type safety is lost. 

This post will be a short one that builds on that and shows a couple of extra things that can be achieved when using Generics in TypeScript. Three things will be shown in this post: Generic Constraints, Generic Methods, and Generic Factories

Introduction to Generics in TypeScript

Generics provides a mechanism for writing code that is flexible enough to apply to a broad range of types but not too flexible that type safety is lost. 

What exactly does the above statement mean?

To demonstrate what it means, we will define a class and a function that makes use of Generics. The generic class will be an implementation of a List, which only allows adding and retrieving an item and the generic function will be the identity function. 

Both the List data structure and the Identity function are good examples because they are straightforward enough to allow for easy demonstration of the Generics concepts.

Let’s start with List.

Introduction to Advanced Types in TypeScript

This is the start of a series of posts where I take a look at aspects of TypeScript's type system that can be referred to as "Advanced".  See this as an exploration of TypeScript’s type system past Classes and Interfaces.

A good mental model to have when exploring the advanced part of TypeScript type system is to see it as a more sophisticated mechanism for creating types. 

The normal, non-advanced ways of creating types in TypeScript involve using features of the language like type alias,  class and interface. 

For example these: 

interface IPerson {
  name: string
  age: number
}

type TPerson = {
  name: string
  age: number
}

class CPerson {
  constructor(private name:string, private age: number) {}
  
  getName() {
    return this.name;
  }

  getAge() {
    return this.name;
  }
}

With the advanced type features, types can be constructed directly or indirectly based on other existing types. How exactly this is done, will be the subject of this series of posts.

The posts in the series include:

• Introduction to Generics in Typescript
• Generic Constraints and More
• Union and Intersection Types
• Literal and Template Literal Types
• Using Literal and Template Literal Types in Typescript
• Overview of Indexable Types in Typescript
• Introduction to Index Types in Typescript
• Tuple Types
• any, unknown, and never types
• Conditional Types
• Mapped Types - Published soon
• Overview of some utility types in Typescript - Published soon

How to apply type annotations to functions in TypeScript

This post explores the various ways of ascribing functions with type annotations in TypeScript. To fully appreciate the various ways of ascribing type annotations to functions, we would first take a quick look at the various ways functions can be defined in JavaScript. Once that is done, we then look at how to bring TypeScript's static type annotation into the picture. 

There are mainly two ways of defining functions in JavaScript. Namely: 

• Function expressions 
• Function declarations. 

Let’s quickly go over how these two work.