Cool application. It's something I've wanted for a while, and I'd probably use it. But linking it here apropos of almost nothing seems a little like shilling.
Proper TypeScript usage is still pretty rare, so this felt OK.
As a startup founder, if you have a choice between telling people about your startup and not telling: tell. This is incredibly hard for engineers, but you just have do it.
Sometimes I wonder, how many amazing technologies have died because the founders simply couldn't ever figure out how to tell the world about what they built.
Can you elaborate on how you got started on TypeScript? What IDEs and editors are you using? What build process? How did you handle integration with non-TS libraries? Are there any problems you faced that you wouldn't have, had you stuck with JS? (I'd read a blog post about this, by the way)
Visual Studio Code, WebStorm have excellent support for TS built-in. There is also CATS (https://github.com/jbaron/cats) that's targeted towards TypeScript.
For Sublime, Atom, etc. there are a bunch of plugins that you can download:
Check out the DefinitelyTyped (http://definitelytyped.org) and Typings (https://github.com/typings) for type definitions to most of the popular JS libraries. There is also a list of some useful tools and utilities on the DefinitelyTyped website but here are a few that might be useful:
Before Sameroom [1], we spent two years building Kato (https://kato.im), which became a Slack competitor once Slack launched. We did enjoy a brief pre-Slack honeymoon (at Techstars, no less).
For a few reasons, we chose Xamarin to build the Kato mobile apps. The end result was pretty good—great, even, considering the ridiculously tight timeline. We had a pretty elaborate common core with all the hard stuff (networking, caching, protocol, presence, etc), and custom UI code for Android and iOS.
In the end, since Kato was to be no more, the real benefit was seeing how much sense it makes to use a strongly-typed, object-oriented language for building complex user interfaces.
Many years ago, and for many years, we were C#/C++ programmers, so it wasn't exactly a revelation. But, we'd been working for quite some time with dynamically-typed Erlang and dynamically-typed Javascript (the Kato UI was built with Knockout.js).
Our server code was fairly straightforward and didn't change very much, so Erlang was an excellent choice there. With JavaScript, we'd programmed our way into some serious debt.
When deciding on a stack for Sameroom, we embarked on a quest to replicate the Xamarin experience for the web. We eventually narrowed in on Flux, React, and TypeScript.
After some experimentation, we got a development workflow working with gulp, shrinkwrap, make, and no particular IDE (we use Atom, Sublime, and Vim).
The biggest crutch was lack of JSX support in TypeScript, so splicing together HTML elements was pretty cumbersome. We viewed this as a temporarly incovenience, which was a good decision—TypeScript 1.6 got React/JSX in September 2015 [2].
We're pretty conservative about adding dependencies, but the overwhelming majority of libraries we do use have TS support available from the DefinitelyTyped project [3]. The few libraries that weren't supported (Stripe checkout and Intercom, if memory serves), we TypeScriptified ourselves.
As a result, working on the Sameroom UI is absolute joy.
It's a little ironic that, unlike Kato, Sameroom basically doesn't need a UI, since it's just marketing copy and an administrative dashboard.
>As a startup founder, if you have a choice between telling people about your startup and not telling: tell.
I really can't agree. It might help your startup, but at the cost of reputation and goodwill. I could choose to start a company and tell people about it by mentioning it in hundreds of posts on message boards and news aggregators, but even if I contributed intelligent discussion and content along with it, I'd still likely be downvoted, "thumbs-downed", and lambasted the vast majority of the time.
Mentioning it is fine in some cases, where it's actually very pertinent to the discussion ("actually, my startup happens to be solving exactly this problem!" or "for a great example of X, check out https://startup.com [Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder]"). These are sensible cases of promotion. But blasting the link when it's barely relevant seems sleazy and disingenuous.
>if you have a choice between telling people about your startup and not telling: tell. This is incredibly hard for engineers, but you just have do it.
Getting publicity is easy, especially if you have no ethics and/or a lot of money to spend. Getting well-deserved and organic publicity is much harder.
Your post was in response to a minor-ish announcement about a programming language that's been around for 4 years, one very similar to the most popular one (JavaScript), and which definitely isn't some kind of unicorn or barely-known gem.
If you just wanted to show that real people are using TypeScript in production, why couldn't you have said "my startup has been successfully using TS for X amount of time and we've been loving it" and nothing more? Anyone who was genuinely interested in what startup it was could look at your other posts, or message you, or click the link from your profile if you had it listed it there. You didn't even link to any source code to show people examples of practical TypeScript.
The exact startup that's using TS doesn't matter in respect to the nature of the comment you made. Perhaps if it were something really notable and unexpected, like Twitter or Google suddenly using TS for their frontend, then mentioning the company makes sense. Here, it just seems like shameless self-promotion.
As a result of your post, I think a little more highly of TypeScript, but in turn, I also think less of your startup. Which is a shame, since it seems like a good idea.
