TypeScript

Why I Stopped Learning Python, Ruby and PHP and Went All In on TypeScript

Around 2020 I made a deliberate decision to stop spreading learning effort across Python, Ruby, and PHP and consolidate around TypeScript. This is the reasoning behind that shift — and why it led me toward statically typed compiled languages rather than away from them.

The Context Switch Cost

For several years I was maintaining professional fluency across multiple languages simultaneously. Python for data pipelines and NLP work, Ruby on Rails for server-side applications, PHP surfacing in legacy projects, and JavaScript on the frontend. Each language has its own idioms, standard library conventions, ecosystem tooling, testing patterns, and community norms.

npm Commands You're Probably Not Using

Most developers know npm install, npm run, and npm publish. The rest of the CLI tends to be discovered only when something breaks — which is the worst possible time to learn a debugging tool.

These are the commands I’ve found myself reaching for repeatedly, in rough order of how often they actually come up.

npm explain

This one earns its place every time a dependency audit or lockfile conflict appears. npm explain traces why a package is in your node_modules — which package required it, and what required that.