I’m migrating a super large codebase over to TypeScript at my job. I generally love projects like these because they’re full of measurable, incremental improvements, and those feel good. At the same time, I’m kinda scared of this one. There are almost 13 thousand files that need to eventually become TypeScript. There are also somewhere between 300 and 500 engineers who need to learn how to write and understand TypeScript. On top of all that, this is the first large-scale migration I’ve planned and lead myself.
To stay sane and to help solidify my thoughts, I’m keeping a journal of useful patterns and weird edge cases. I’m writing here (as opposed to publishing them somehow through work) because none of these ideas are fully baked. Publishing them through work means I have to pretend like I know what I’m talking about, and I do not.
For a few reasons, this migration has to happen gradually (at least at first). There’s a lot of writing about how TypeScript can be adopted gradually. I haven’t found a ton of guides that talk about writing code for the in-between period when a codebase is both full of TypeScript and untyped madness. I’m calling this series “Gradually TypeScript.”
Here’s everything I’ve written so far, in no particular order.
Gradually TypeScript: Adding types to React components without removing their propTypes.
Gradually TypeScript: Tips for writing types for your libraries.