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Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr
   

Lead Engineer at Atomist

Jessica Kerr is a developer of development systems. She works remotely from St. Louis, for Atomist, where she writes automations and automation infrastructure in TypeScript, Clojure, and whatever else is needed. She is a back-end developer who believes the front-end is most crucial. Jessica speaks at conferences in the US and Europe; find her on the >Code podcast (greaterthancode.com) and on Twitter and Medium as @jessitron.

Presentations

TypeScript: Because It's Useful

4:30 PM MDT

Rod Johnson, creator of Spring, says TypeScript his new favorite language. “It's just so useful!” After working in Scala, Java, and Clojure for years, I have to agree. TypeScript is a perfectly practical compromise. It's designed for developers, not theorists.

If you like static types, come learn what TypeScript offers that even Scala doesn't. Duck typing is charming when it includes unions and literals and partials.

If you hate static types, learn how to keep them out of your way until they become useful. There are tricks for this.

This session will cover the TypeScript language, with a focus on back-end development in Node. I'll cover some of the ways Node differs
from the JVM, especially dependency loading and concurrency. I'll focus on gradual typing: how to evolve a codebase from flexible to
safe. Learn how to get rid of typing.

TypeScript is not a language for zealots. It is a language for developers who want to get work done and get it mostly right. Come let
me sell you on it, or teach you more about its interesting and useful corners.

Shaving the Golden Yak

11:00 AM MDT

Programming is a series of frustrations. Everything we do, we could do better or faster if we only had our tools set up just so. If our error messages were a little better, our code a little cleaner, our tests a lot wider. When we spend time on this, it's known as “yak shaving,” and it can get messy.

How do you balance the work you’re supposed to be doing with the work that makes your work, work? Dive into the yak stack with me. We'll see five different species of yak, and discuss how and when to tackle each one. At the bottom of the yak stack, we might find the Golden Yak, with secret wisdom engraved on its skin.

This session will give you reasons to spend time smoothing your development experience, and clues for where to spend that time in ways that help your whole team.