Static Types and React - How to Maintain Higher Quality Code with Flow

JavaScript is great because of its dynamic nature and rich and expressive syntax. But for what we know, missing type-enforcement, the use of anonymous functions, dynamic function argument lists and contexts also makes it very hard to document, analyze and safely execute code for both, humans and machines.

Wouldn’t it be nice, if we could use a tool which automatically documents our code, is able to analyze and deliver code intelligence about our API, without rewriting our existing codebase in a different language and use ES-conform JavaScript instead?

Actually, there is. It’s called Flowtype and it’s great!

In this talk, I will discuss how typed JavaScript will make our lives so much easier in the near future, focus on how Flowtype is solving practical day to day problems in our React & Redux codebase and how it helped us write better and self-documenting code without the pain of rewriting everything from scratch.