I like to set noImplicitAny in my TypeScript projects in the hopes it will catch just a few more bugs before they hit production. Problem we had recently was that not every library author agrees with me. In this case the aws-amplify project gave us this error.

node_modules/aws-amplify/lib/Interactions/Interactions.d.ts
(19,44): Parameter 'err' implicitly has an 'any' type.

Well that sucks, they should use noImplicitAny! From our perspective we can fix this by not applying our implicit any rules to library definition files. This can be done by adding

"skipLibCheck": true

To the compilerOptions in our tsconfig.json so that errors in the definition files there were ignored.

I’ve been at this programming game for a long time and I’ve written two books on JavaScript. Still today I ran into some code that had me scratching my head. It looked like

function AppliedRoute ({ component: C, props: cProps, ...rest }) {

I was converting some JavaScript to TypeScript and this line threw an linting error because of implicit any. That means that the type being passed in has no associated type information and has been assumed to be of type any. This is something we’d like to avoid. Problem was I had no idea what this thing was. It looked like an object but it was being built in the parameters?

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Application Insights is another entry in the vast array of log aggregators that have been springing up in the last few years. I think log aggregators are very important for any deployed production system. They give you insight into what is happening on the site and should be your first stop whenever something has gone wrong. Being able to search logs and correlate multiple log streams give you just that much more power. One feature I don’t see people using as much as they should is basing alerting off of log information. Let’s mash on that.

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Logging is super important in any microservices environment or really any production environment. Being able to trace where your log messages are coming from is very helpful. Fortunately Application Insights have a field defined for just that.

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