Full Stack TypeScript: Express, React, and Typescript

This is my hobby project where I will be Learning In Public about full-stack Typescript applications!

The goal is to replicate some features from client work down using Scala/GraphQL/Elm as the stack. The application has a lot of interactivity with form fields that save on blur, and interactive auto-completing dropdown menus.

Some questions I hope to answer:

• What's it like working in Typescript, and how much of what I love about Scala and Elm can I apply to working in TS?
• What's involved in putting a project together? Coming from Rails, I'm pretty spoiled and lazy. I parachuted into the Scala/Elm project after setup, but th Elm setup was super easy (Yay, Parcel!)
• Using types for the expected response/request objects for endpoint responses and requests like the example in this video from Gary Bernhardt.
• How fast can I work? Taking into account all the initial onboarding and learning, can I see myself being productive with this stack in the future?

The Stack and libraries I'd like to use 📚

• Express.js for the API server.
• React for the client.
• Postgres for the database.
• TypeScript for the types!
• io-ts for typing the API.
• TailwindCSS for styling the front end.

Installation

From the root of the project run:

• yarn install then
• yarn build && yarn start

TODO: hotreload dev setup for the server side.

Experiences so far

Parcel is really nice

Trying to figure out how to set everything up was a bit overwhelming, having never done this before in JavaScript let alone with TypeScript in the mix. I tried to stick with [Create React App] aka CRA and then started running into issues when I added [TailwindCSS] and even more issues when I wanted to hot reload for development.

My experience in all of this is that there are a lot of informal, specific solutions documented everywhere that are often incorrect for my use case or just incorrect generally because some piece of the jigsaw had a version bump. This has been my experience with JavaScript generally and its the most frustrating part of getting started so far. My appreciation for the Rails Way has grown deeper. I invested a lot of time in googling, reading docs, trying out random suggestions, only to eventually pull out Parcel which so far has been fantastic and resolved all my issues!