The article is purely a marketing piece. As we know with all tech, it’s how you hold it. Yes, you can certainly graph all the entities, activities & relationships - but there is the human tendency towards laziness, least path of resistance and the desire to show “look what I can do” that inevitably leads towards using using weak/garbage data without verification - often in the form of purchases/collected metadata.

Concrete example with a less scary outcome; I was involved in a project for real-estate marketing that used “quality” metadata to infer potential buyers/sellers/properties to target for a given marketing campaign and/or what marketing techniques/campaigns might influence a targeted entity. It was cool. For sure. But, due to the lack of integrity in the data, even with well known & trusted data (direct from the MLS) the result was a graph that made many very weak/inaccurate connections and resulted in a great deal of wasted marketing efforts/cost, targeting the wrong message to the wrong entity at the wrong time. Because it was still a major improvement over other tools in the space, it became the preferred path even with inaccuracies galore.

Now, imagine if the cost of inaccuracies is human freedom - vs wasted cents. Scary stuff.

I guess I’m tainted/jaded by the early proponents and initial rationale that was absolutely tied to - “ewwww dynamic types!?! Gross, where are my strong/static types!?”. I’ve just fought that too many times - and that was a very strong argument at the inception of TS. There certainly are value props that go beyond and more to be discovered I’m sure.

I feel like MANY if not most of the devs I work with today simply use TS cause “that’s what you do these days” - but they have no clue what the “why” is and are baffled by native JS typing - and still consider JS “garbage” as a result. Bummer. In the Scala community I hear so much hate for NodeJS because it enables JS for server-side, “where it doesn’t belong” for many of these same old reasonings about typing (even with TS!?).

So yah, there’s value there, but you don’t NEED it to write large, good software. I’m clearly just jaded by the religious debates that have gone on and on - so despite their utility, I can come across very anti to the “solutions” to IMHO shitty arguments.

I’d strongly encourage doing a deeper dive here. Functions in JS are objects and can have their own methods/props + scope. They’re a first class citizen.

JS was certainly never a “garbage” language but the elegance is unappealing/unappreciated by entire classes of developers. I totally get the perspective, but it’s all based on a worldview that just doesn’t get functional programming

Yes, ES6 brings the OOPiness

I’ll double down on the urge to drop TypeScript. That pile of nonsense came from the classic OOP folks - “But where are my TYPEs!? How do I know what type that variable is!?” (first the Java/C++ folks then the .NET folks “solved” the brain fuzz around functional programming and dynamic types by giving you TypeScript)

Having been out of the m$ ecosystem for some time, I’m kinda surprised HTAs are still around, I’m guessing to avoid breaking things. Once .NET started taking off - I always assumed that would replace the VBScript side of things and let you build proper, elegant system interfaces for your JavaScript app. I really imagined the goal was to drop Windows forms/object controls - but I always imagined BATTLES at m$ over being able to create Windows “apps” that didn’t conform to native UI controls, couldn’t be controlled through Windows theming engines, etc. kinduva brand control battle. I always imagined some team going “NOOO, just build a web app, you’re breaking all the UI rules!!!”

Nifty project, but IMHO the world is better off using native JavaScript without all the BS that comes with TypeScript, etc. JavaScript is so powerful and amazing, it’s a bummer to hamstring your app by using TypeScript and classic OO inheritance models that preclude the beauty and dynamics of JavaScript as a functional, prototypal language.

I personally didn’t see suggestions that would have significant impact on code quality - simply helping one more quickly express initial concepts including all the language necessities. Intellisense++ish.

I have only seen it assist developers who were going down a bad path get there more quickly. I have not observed anything that would encourage/discourage any design pattern or developer choice.

My gut tells me that the fact that devs can more quickly deliver a “solution” (bad/good) means that they deliver their fat PR and … well … it’s fat - so it’s not scrutinized as well as it might have been had the dev taken some time and another set of eyes hit their branch before they got too far along. It’s often much harder to get the proper attention and review on a large-ish PR than it is to peek in along the way.

I personally couldn’t find anything that I feel would inherently lead to lower quality code. I do see how devs could more quickly deliver their low quality code and it can be a challenge to deny that code.

I’m left on the fence. I’ve found it valuable for autocompletion of what I’m about to express, but I also have no illusion that it’s going to tell me that what I’m about to express is stupid and/or of low quality.

Those things about quality are also quite language specific. Not so much about guessing what you might be about to type for tab-completion.

Also note - it’s about efficiency - as GitHub has stated. Duh. Notice copy/paste declined? Tab-completion. How many jr devs have you seen that won’t just write out a function declaration, they copy paste an entire function, gut it, and write their code. Odd to me, super slow and lame, but even I have seen the utility of tab-completing empty function blocks that are 90% of what I wanted.

Sooo. I’m inclined to say it’s interesting - but in no way at all diagnostic, deterministic or a very good study when it comes to writing conclusions. These are hyperbolic statements. Nearly link-bait.

One of our cultural principles is, literally, “Get shit done”.

Another is, “Your mom’s a donor”.

In your position, I might recommend associating with other volunteer based non-profits and gather some good, concrete concepts around how they plan, their guiding values, how they organize and conduct activities, how they source supplies and execute logistics to support their volunteers, etc.

These relationships and ideas may give you some concrete feedback and examples to share; and offer a conduit for your leadership to engage other leaders and learn from them the lessons & challenges ahead.

Good luck