Building Typesafe APIs with tRPC & TypeScript

Interview:

What is the focus of your work these days?

In the past couple of months I've been working on building an open source platform to get people excited about contributing, but also helping companies to finance open source, and most recently have been building APIs to support that work.

What's the motivation behind your talk?

The motivation behind this talk is that we were exploring building an API for the product that I was working on, and there's a lot of tools out there. It's been a while since I've built brand new APIs, so I've been hearing about tRPC for a while from friends and other engineers that I've worked with, so I decided to take the plunge, do some research, and this talk itself is the culmination of all that research.

What is the target audience?

The target audience is front-end or full stack devs that are working in JavaScript or TypeScript and looking for what's next or what's new about building APIs. So if you're working on a front-end app, this will be valuable to you because you'll know how to build your own API without waiting for a back-end team. If you are a back-end engineer, and you want to help support front-end engineers, you'll also have a good understanding of how you could support this with end-to-end type safety.

What are the main takeaways from your session?

I would say that the entire approach of TypeScript has changed in the last year with these new updates and how ergonomic it's become. I think if you haven't tried TypeScript, definitely try it out now and hopefully this talk will get you interested in that. But also tRPC is only a couple of years old, so this is now the time. It's really early. There's still lots of missing documentation, which I'll mention in my talk, but really I would love for people to walk away excited about working with this technology and helping support the community in open source and creating documentation, examples, etc.