T for TypeScript, T for Train, robust code you will maintain

A presentation at KonferenSE:21 by Robin Pokorny

When we code, we tend to focus on the ‘happy path’. But in the real world, our application has to deal with validation, logging, network errors, and other ‘un-happy paths’.

The good news is that we know about these different paths: we know that validations may fail and we know that network requests may not come back. Railway-oriented programming is an approach that makes sure we think about and handle all these possible outcomes.

In our team, we were programming in a railway-oriented style before we discovered it has a name. Today, we are fully aware of and embrace this approach in every PR we make. Thanks to this, our services are very robust.

Railway-oriented programming is a term coined by Scott Wlaschin, who talks and writes about it using F# language. I will show how we in our team write it in TypeScript with the help of a library called fp-ts.

Video