A LEAP IN THE EVOLUTION OF AIRTABLE'S CODEBASE: SCALING TYPESCRIPT TO THOUSANDS OF PROJECTS

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Airtable's migration to TypeScript improved development, but the sheer number of projects (nearly 3,000) slowed down typechecking. To address this, Airtable restructured its codebase into smaller, more manageable projects using Bazel and custom tools to manage dependencies and identify bottlenecks. It used TypeScript 5.5's Isolated Declarations feature, along with automated type generation and improved tooling, which overall reduced typechecking time by 65%.