I love to see these in the wild, so I decided I may as well compile my own! My philosophy on buying things is that I should view every purchase like buying a laptop—do research. If I don’t have the time to research this object like a laptop (I usually don’t), I default onto recommendations (people who have done their research)!

There are a couple purchases in my life that I would 1000% re-buy and definitely recommend to other people.

Here's an backlink to the actual database:

<a href="https://neelr.notion.site/neel-s-object-recommendation-list-1745b5ce4b858081b10ed2aeec14f58c?pvs=4">A link to the Notion database</a>

a quick link to a notion page I made about stuff to buy!

Just a few weeks ago, I started to use typescript a lot more in my projects, trying it out in a multitude of applications. After using it in and out, and trying it on a few projects, I think I've come to a conclusion on whether or not its a good language. But first defining what I think a good language is. A good language needs to be intuitive, easy to use, easy to debug, and reasonably performant. In my experience, typescript seems to check all those boxes.

Starting with my first qualm with javascript that typescript seems to fix is undefined errors. These errors happen ALL THE TIME, if you're a javascript developer, where you either have to log an object to tell its properties, or rely on your memory to spell everything out correctly. Even with that, sometimes the values might not be there, and be very hard to catch, with an object with an undefined key returning undefined. Typescript gives an elegant typing system that seems to mesh really nicely with the javascript ecosystem, and makes knowing the type of every variable very easy. 

The best part I find, is that it allows degrees of flexibility, so that everything doesn't need to be statically typed at all. You can include snippets of JS with TS and have everything mesh really easily. The typing is relatively similar to rust typings with angle brackets, which helps a lot when switching over. Overall the debugging experience is a lot more pleasant, where I find a much larger ratio of code to debugging than before.

The second main reason for loving typescript other than just debugging, is auto complete, which comes from the implications of having types in a language. This is super helpful as it speeds up the need of having to check the documentation time and time again, just to look for that one method that you need. Typescript defines everything very explicitly, so you can look through the methods and properties inside the object with ease, and almost never have to deal with the maze of checking which class you have stored in a variable and determining which methods are available.

Overall, I find typescript quite enjoyable, and can't wait to use it in my next projects! If you want to check out an example of one of my projects I'm writing in typescript, you can take a look at the discord bot I'm building for AngelHacks!

My thoughts on whether or not to use typescript, and if its an all around good language.

What is <a href="https://airtable.com">Airtable</a>? Airtable is a "spreadsheet" that people use online that has a much better UI than Google Spreadsheets, or even Excel, but has the same tools! The reason I dont call it a spreadsheet is because of the API. Think of a perfect database, where you can look at it on your phone, computer, from wherever you want, and still have the ease of use of a database like MongoDB.
The answer is Airtable! The API is easy to use, has a node wrapper, and can be seen everywhere! You can store your data in one table, and in another you can have form data, and another database in teh other! Even though Airtable is my go to database, I still have a few cons for it:
Pros:
<ul>
<li>Easy to use API</li>
<li>Can view anywhere</li>
<li>Convienient with otehr data</li>
<li>Mostly free, and unlimited storage</li>
<li>Supports numbers, dates, ratings, and other non-programming data</li>
</ul>
Cons:
<ul>
<li>No JSON support 😭😭</li>
<li>Not "professional" yet</li>
</ul>
All in all I feel like Airtable is a serious database competitor to MongoDB or other databases. If you want, you can see a few of my newer projects using it! <a class="redlink" href="https://github.com/hacker719/gamblot">Gamblot</a>, and <a href="https://github.com/hacker719/linkshort">LinkShort</a>

A review of a cool productivity application, which also can double as a database!

Quick background info. Repl.it and glitch are both cloud coding platforms geared toward giving coding platforms for people on the go.In the start of 2019, when competing in my science fair, a kid saw me running repl.it for my project. He started talking to me about this new platform called glitch! I decided to give it a try, and set up my project. And I waited for it to load and initialize. I waited, and waited, and waited. The glitch servers were frustratingly slow with basically nothing running on them, so I reverted back to repl.it.Usually, I would give this nothing more than that and never think about it again. Then, in the past few months, a few of my friends started to use glitch and started to tell me about how great, and amazing it was. I just said that the servers were slow and UI bad. Then in the past few weeks, I've been trying out glitch, and to my knowledge, the UI has improved, the server speed, the integrations, and almost everything about it! So many things, that I think I might start to use it over repl.it.Disclaimer: The main project I have done on glitch is my <a class="linkred" href="https://glitch.com/~dankmemes2208">dankmemes2208 bot</a> and haven't used glitch too much since, but I have been using repl.it for over 5 yearsA quick show of repl.it features:<ul><li>Online Multiplayer (recently updated)</li><li>Variety of coding languages and frameworks</li><li>Highly flexible Polygott</li><li>Great Community</li><li>......</li><li>Very glitchy when working serverside</li><li>Unable to use console/bash when running</li><li>Unable to update filetree to current one</li><li>No github push integration</li></ul>And then of glitch<ul><li>Multiplayer (better in my opinion)</li><li>Mostly for Node.js but supports other languages</li><li>Havent seen community so can't talk about that</li><li>Many github integrations</li><li>Git repository to edit when offline or not on website</li><li>✨VSCode integration✨</li><li>Fast as lightning</li><li>.....</li><li>Not many other languages, but covered up by the better UI and everything else</li></ul>All in all I  think glitch would have to be the winner so far because of all the integrations (VSCode integration is 100% amazing), speed, and not being glitchy (ha...). So far on most repl.it projects, you have to fork it to actually make it work. I hope in the future repl.it becomes better and fixes the glitches and adds github or VScode integrations! I will update this if any important changes come! I hope both get better to help foster competition to help us all!

An honest comparison between Glitch and Repl.it

#review

stuff i recommend buying

TypeScript: Yay or Nay?

Airtable

Glitch vs Repl.it

.css-4cffwv{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;min-width:0;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}#review

stuff i recommend buying

TypeScript: Yay or Nay?

Airtable

Glitch vs Repl.it

#review