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Created November 5, 2020 21:10
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Orta's self review - late 2020
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review.md

Core Priorities

  1. Lower the barrier of entry to adopting and understanding TypeScript. North star.

  2. Understand the TypeScript Codebase enough to provide useful API documentation and fix bugs. Validated by having a more comprehensive set of tools for people to understand how the language and tooling works.

  3. Make contributing to TypeScript easier, and reduce the amount of work maintainers need to do. Validated probably by the number of open PRs, and the number of external contributors per release.

  4. Make it easier to people wanting to build tooling around TypeScript. Validated by seeing more usage of tools like the community discord, people shipping tools with TypeScript support by default etc.

Looking Back

What contributions did you make this period and what was the resulting business impact?

Damn, this time period has felt like such a long time that it's actually surprising that both of these happened inside this time period:

  • Launched the new v2 Website, docs and branding
  • Shipped DT Mergebot 2 and got it stable, onboarded Eli to continue maintaining

Which quite frankly felt like they were shipped an era ago, and not within this connect review period.

When I took a walk to prepare for this trying to cover what I did during this time period neither really even registered. Things which did come up:

  • Helped bootstrap TypeScript support for the Svelte ecosystem
  • Paired regularly with @wesleywigham on lots of compiler bugs, to the point that my 4.1 bugs list was close enough to zero
  • Started coordinating, updating and reviewing the new TypeScript handbook
  • Started & ran a two-weekly docs review session which helps get consensus on docs
  • Provided all the code and copy for Type or Treat
  • Worked to make sure that every TS codebase I have built lives in a Microsoft org, and is extremely documented
  • Helped provide the infra to get the website translated into 6 languages

Like a lot of our work on the TypeScript team, the resulting business impact is always somewhat transitive. E.g. making a TSConfig Reference tool have a direct business impact, not directly - but feedback on the docs has always raised it as a problem. I think the work I do helps the massive community of TypeScript users understand a very complex tool, that has business impact.

What could you have done differently for even greater business impact?

Unsure, be less fatigued by the world? Like obviously there's space for improvement, but we're also living through a global pandemic and watching the slow decline of democracy in the US. Getting up and giving a solid 9 to 5 is enough.

Perhaps I could have shipped more compiler bugs, perhaps I could have paired with more people, perhaps I could of aimed to do less but potentially more impactful things. Again, this set of ideas isn't that different from every previous connect, and generally every self review I've done for the last decade.

I know my general weaknesses (often opting for "good enough", preference to work alone, opting for many simultaneous on-going projects vs synchronously starting and finishing things, etc) and strive to collaborate with others to mitigate those issues by balancing skills.

Going Forward

What are your key deliverables and the expected business impact for the upcoming period?

  • I'd like to get the old handbook deprecated by the end of the year, kept around so we don't break URLs, but with everyone feeling good about v2.

  • I'd like to wrap-up the revised index page, and a page for Definitely Typed, and have the start of a section on using the "typescript" dependency.

  • I don't quite have the shape of it in my head, but I'd like the content for future Type or Treat-like events live inside the site natively (and be easy to re-use)

  • I'd like to re-vamp tsc --help

  • I'd like to try shepard in more community PRs to TypeScript

Like most of my time on the TypeScript team, it's a general balance of grokking the internals in order to provide better learning paths and documentation coverage. I think they align with the TypeScript project goals and my own.

What will you do in the upcoming period to learn and grow? Consider the experiences or skills you would like to build for your growth and development

Always tricky, any compiler work is growth. Any design work is growth, and I don't really feel like there are additional experiences or skills which I'd want to get from my day-to-day. We do interesting work.

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orta commented Nov 5, 2020

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