There are plenty of ways to get information on and access to the latest trends and technologies, but going to conferences is sure one with great benefits. You can not only hear top notch experts giving you hints and tools to improve your workflow, but you can further build your network and get hands-on experience on the spot. Fortunately, there are numerous quality events within and beyond our borders and ReactiveConf is most certainly one of them. It takes place in the beautiful city of Prague and is the ultimate spot for the European tech community to get the latest global insights in web & mobile development through meaningful connections and shared experiences. We were among this year’s attendees and we even went backstage to interview some of the speakers, so that we could share all the great information on their hands with you, too.

In the second episode of this Special Edition TechTalk series Balázs Komár Co-Founder @IseeQ and @xLabs and Matthew Gerstman Senior Software Engineer @Dropbox talk TypeScript, while our current interviewee shares bits of his own story, gives hints on what he’s looking for in a candidate during their interview, and explains successful mentorship.
Starting off on a friendly note, Matthew tells us that he was just 8 years old when he was fascinatedly watching his friend’s older brother making a video game, who then handed him tutorials from which he learnt the visual basics. That’s how he first got into programming. Since then, he’d gone to school for it, worked at startups and now he’s been enjoying working for a larger, more popular tech company Dropbox. 
When asked about his experience with TypeScript, Matthew funnily states “in the first few months it constantly got in my way, I found it very annoying and now I can’t live without it”. Then he further explains that when someone is considering to switch to this language, they have several different routes they can take and the level of difficulty they experience depends on them. “For example if you’re just starting a brand new project then you’ll probably start running things really quickly, if you’re trying to shoehorn TypeScript into a giant codebase that already exists, you’re going to run into new challenges and have trouble integrating.”
If you’re unfamiliar with this language and the first thing that crosses your mind is how you can deal with untyped dependencies in TypeScript, Matthew gives a few insights on that, too. There are actually two ways to look at it, but for example “let’s say it’s your code or it’s a small library that hasn’t been typed. There’s then again kind of two options: you can create these things that are called ‘.d.ts’ files that are very similar to header files like C or Java and you can either thoroughly type what all the functions should look like in this library or all of the interfaces should look like, or you can say “hey, when I’m just using this library, trust me I know what I’m doing” and you don’t get type safety there but it’ll work and interact with your other code that is at least kind of type safe”.
Further dissecting its qualities, Matthew actually states that “TypeScript is not sound because we can’t always guarantee that everything is a 100% typesafe”. Yet we get to know that “[it] has just achieved much much stronger adoption and has many many more users, many more libraries are available on it, and it’s easier to find resources these days”; resulting in an ever so great community built around it.
Let this be enough to catch your attention and make you watch or listen to the whole interview because believe us it’s worth it!

Matthew tells so much more about this great language, about how he sees the future, what he’s always looking for in a candidate during the interview process, what tools can be useful and what a successful mentorship looks like. All great highlights if you want to improve your ways…
So, here’s the real deal: