Review: Real-World TypeScript
Learn to model and transform complex types with utility, conditional, and mapped types. Understand how decorators add behavior cleanly and discover a practical strategy for migrating JavaScript projects to TypeScript incrementally and safely.
We'll cover the following...
- Utility types: Transform without rewriting
- The keyof, indexed access, and typeof: Reflect and extract
- Template literals and mapped types: Generate predictable patterns
- Conditional types and infer: Type logic with branching power
- Declarative power with decorators: Structure meets behavior
- Migration strategy: Progress without disruption
- What we reinforced?
This chapter wasn’t just about syntax—it was about learning a skill. We learned how to model, transform, and infer types with precision. These tools let us build production-grade code that stays accurate, resilient, and expressive no matter how complex the domain gets.
Let’s recap what we made possible.
Utility types: Transform without rewriting
TypeScript’s utility types are like functional programming for your types. We don’t mutate. We compose, reshape, and adapt.
// Strip sensitive fields from a typetype FullUser = {id: string;name: string;email: string;password: string;};type PublicUser = Omit<FullUser, "password">;
We used:
Pickto select fields.Omitto exclude them.Partialto make fields optional.Requiredto lock them down.Recordto build dictionary-like structures on demand.
And we didn’t stop there. We combined them:
type ProductDraftMap = Record<string, Partial<Omit<Product, "sku">>>;
This is clean, composable, and safe type logic.
The keyof, indexed access, and typeof: Reflect and extract
In real projects, we often define a base object type—then need to reference its keys, values, or structure in multiple places. Hardcoding those references leads to fragile code. If the original shape changes, ...