ana-utils

Utility functions for the Ana ecosystem. These functions follow design patterns I personally like.

Core concepts

These are the fundamental ideas that the design decisions come from.

Optional values with enforced defaults

I’ll define this idea by example, this will expose my thought process when designing software patterns. Let’s say we are building a website about movies and we designed a Film interface:

interface Film {
  /** The original film title in the original language using UTF-8 encoding. */
  title: string,
  /** Date formated to miliseconds from Unix Epoch. Main usage expects only day, 
   month, and year. Defaults to 00:00 for the time, and to Jan 1st in case only 
   the year is known. */
  dateReleased: number,
  /** Measured in minutes. */
  runtime: number,
  /** It is an array for movies with multiple directors. Include contribution 
   inside parenthesis, e.g. (uncredited) */
  directors: string[],
  /** Include contribution inside parenthesis, e.g. (based on novel by) */
  writers: string[]
}

Now we can use the Film interface to a function that does something with it, e.g. fetching a film from the DB, rendering a film, editing an existing film, etc. This would be an example film that passes the interface check.

const film: Film = {
 title: 'Fargo',
 dateReleased: 828939600000, /* Mar 8th, 1996 */
 runtime: 98,
 directors: ['Joel Coen', 'Ethan Coen (uncredited)'],
 writers: ['Joel Coen', 'Ethan Coen']
}