Second Brain

Broke Both Arms, Discovered TypeScript

The Story

About 10 years ago, Boris was riding a motorcycle and got in a bad accident. He broke both arms. Both of them. He had two slings on and couldn’t code for a month.

When his hands started working again, they still hurt. JavaScript, the language he used at the time, required too many keystrokes. So out of pure physical necessity, he started exploring languages with less syntax: CoffeeScript (fewer parentheses), then Haskell and functional programming (same logic, fewer keystrokes).

This led him to Scala, where a coworker named Rick got him deep into functional programming. Boris credits “Functional Programming in Scala” as the single most impactful technical book of his career: “It’s going to completely change the way that you code.”

From Scala, he moved to TypeScript. He found the language “magnificent” but completely underserved: nobody was writing about it. So he wrote the book himself. “Programming TypeScript” (O’Reilly, 2019) ate up a year of his life. “Would not recommend it,” he says, but it established him as a thought leader.

Off the back of the book, he started the world’s largest TypeScript meetup in San Francisco. That’s where he met people like Ryan Dahl (creator of Node.js) and realized “all these people are just people. Anyone can do this stuff.”

Lesson for Creators

Forced constraints open unexpected doors. A motorcycle accident forced Boris out of JavaScript and into the work that defined his career: functional programming, TypeScript expertise, an O’Reilly book, a massive community, and connections with industry leaders. When your current path gets blocked, the detour might be the destination.

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